The great Horace, childhood lover to Homer the Blind, when asked of love and its effects by the town council, who were conducting their Survey of the Mysteries, gathered his robes, stood up, left the auditorium, and never spoke again.

The time was technical summer, a season that had been achieved by nature so many times, so incessantly, that a clotted arrangement of birds created splotches of ink called shadows, and whole days went by without gunfire.  Shadows were simply blind spots that everyone shared.   Kill holes were called graves, and apologies known as writing were incised in their surface.  Rotten bags were called people.  Milk was never sprayed from a fire hose at children until they skittered over the pavement like weevils, but the children wore shields of clothing regardless, and the people who guarded them were often trembling.

There was a chance, however remote, that we—among all the others who also famously walked the earth—would not breathe again, however much our mouths looked wet and ready for action.  If we pictured ourselves in the future, we were forced to imagine our coffins shifting on a loosely soiled terrain, slipping into their pre-dug holes.

In short, it was necessary to establish a romantic alliance and to publish the results inside each other’s bodies.  In short, when we referred to our fear as “tomorrow,” our only solution was to seek aerial sensations with each other.  In short, although we pretended to choose who we would destroy in the name of a relationship, we were instead forced at each other, feigning admiration for the way our bodies lacked fat, hair, and color.

We together conceived of solitude as a math problem, such like the ancients must have encountered when they saw two different suns in the sky: a daytime sun that was hot and burned out the eyes, and an evening sun that was cool, pale, and white.   Each would soon have its own name, but for the time being the suns were anonymous, and they careened to a complex logic, and they were frequently misunderstood.  People often died of heartbreak because of them.  Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains.  An obituary water called rain fell everywhere, and the ancients turned the hammered surface of their faces into it, but still could not feel better.

Questions we did not ask, because Ovid already asked them so well: in what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude?  In what way would our daily compromises, our small shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other?  In what way would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves?

A relationship between us—two average-sized people who could not be mistaken for chess pieces, however much our faces looked chiseled and wooden and over-noticed—would be a chance to mutually seek solutions to the dilemma of solitude.  Other people, we discovered, had a plus or minus charge, similar to those colored beads called electrons.  To be around the minus people was to have one’s solitude erased, whereas the plus people seemed only to add to the solitude, which had a limitless growth potential, a way of swelling inside the skin, creating an aroma called disgust.  If one of us experienced a deepening solitude in a crowd, a so-called Spanish Moment, we might conclude that a majority of the crowd was plus capacity, so overflowing with their own solitude that they could do nothing but share it with whoever entered their sphere.  These people hated mud.  They did not wish to be killed.

We were partners in a puzzle, then.  The difficulty level was 9, or 9.3.  There were no clues.  We would have to wait until we parted from each other to discover whether we had won or lost.  This was incentive enough to over-explore each other’s eccentricities, to enter a race toward bored familiarity.

This took place in an area known as the world, where people cannot fly.  Cocoons called nightgowns adorn the bodies there.  When the cocoons are lifted, an investigation occurs, and the result is often a wetness, a smearing on of fluids.  In this country, we breathe into each other’s genitals with a periscope called a straw.  We blow on them.  We make a fan out of notebook paper and wave it over the area, using the age-old excuse that we simply love to read, and what better narrative than the one inscribed upon the genitals of our familiars?  We play pipe organ music out of a stereo that looks like an old wooden shoe.  Sex is not an event that someone is invited to, however much we sit by the phone anyway, waiting.  Oh, there has been so much wetness between the people that streets have been built to collect the runoff.

As Cicero, the great sage, said: And an old shoe is beaten against the pavement.  Yes, when the lovers meet, us destitute ones hide in the road and beat our hard old shoes against it.

We met inside the fat clear globules known as air.  There was no fudge in the room.  Swimming skills were not required.  There were no weapons.  A pocket-sized emissary named “Joe” introduced us.  I did not love myself.

Afraid of the predictability of my attraction, I started a project with her called “I don’t like you.”  It was inter-cut with other popular projects, such as “I am tired and scared,” and “You are so beautiful that I am afraid to have sex with you.”  Her project revolved around the “Everything’s fine” model.  She held her cookie up high, and I jumped and touched my cheek to it.  Through several mutual misunderstandings, we grew to need each other, a need that could be charted on a calendar.  The parchment was signed with an evidence stick.  Many children clapped.

It was agreed.  She would chop at my husk, and I would begin publishing my name inside her mouth.

Courtship is based on hatred, according to one of the great thinkers, Robert Montgomery, a man who ate a series of meals, belched into a well, and then died.  Hatred was a tactic the Phoenicians used when they met an enemy, and it has been the reigning wartime model ever since, however plain, however obvious.  She and I, my solitude defeater, were no more enemies than any ancient man and woman bagged in cheap skin and fading hair, yet a battle was afoot, employing weaponry such as indifference and laughter, kissing and ambivalence, rubbing upon each other’s bottoms with a bath brush, and waiting to see who would have the honor of starting the first argument.  The goal was not to admit that we each suspected a future dependence upon the other.  We commenced a theater of attractive indifference in order to seal our obligation to each other.  We engaged in a strenuous denial of need.  A holiday might one day be made out of this behavior.  It would be called “Monday.”

It was not illegal to know each other.  It was just difficult.  We used different cities as launching pads, when cities were linked by layers of chuff called roads and roads were not called devil carpets.

The ancients were so disloyal that they died and never thought of their loved ones again.  Homer called dead people “traitors.”  The greatest loves were simply forgotten, and the bodies of leaders and slaves alike began to melt.  The love between two people has never been stored in a vial and sold in a shop, yet sometimes she and I, the two of us, on the threshold of no longer caring for each other, a precipice called the Waking Moment, lay together in the bed shaking at each other’s bodies as though we only had water inside us and could be just so easily poured away.  We used a wringing technique called a hug, and squeezed at each other with great force, hoping that somewhere on a floor beneath us there was a drain big enough to take the water part of this stranger we had been loving and wash them away, quite far from us, and then further still, until we could only hear the faintest sound, which we might mistake for a river.

The bland shadows thrown by her relaxed march through the living room, from the kitchen and to the hallway that led to the carpeted foot of the attic stairs, crossed the usual witnesses to the family’s daily affairs: the white statuette of an embracing Romeo and Juliet, a souvenir from a trip Nonna had taken to the Old Country, the artwork’s base of opulent Renaissance clothing a flume of tumbling creases and folds dusted in soft brown paint which arrested the casual observer’s eye, which was a good thing, because the tragic hero’s head had been removed –– accidentally, unceremoniously –– by the boy and his two, older brothers in a fit of roughhousing one summer afternoon; and the framed family snapshots, all of the children and some cousins; and the fuscous sofa and loveseat, their arms matted from years of use and, at some edges, frayed, and the chocolate leather recliner, a former star now way past its prime though struggling valiantly and pitifully to retain its old sense of dignity –– a few of the rounded gold tacks that once trimmed its legs in orderly rows were missing; and the beautiful faces of the celebrities and models on the covers of the ladies’ magazines and department-store catalogs, crowding the chipped coffee table and the chipped end tables, each facial expression a wanton plea to be consumed; and the plastic cherubs, with their curlicue’d tresses and their tiny, fat digits and limbs suspended in the service of translucent glass bulbs and teardrop beads and plastic ivy, all of them cheap details on cheap, gaudy lamps and wall fixtures; and some of the boy’s colorful drawings of Biblical passages, including his mother’s favorite, a gently clunky but impassioned and colorful reckoning of the scene at the Garden of Gethsemane; …

… the domestic effects, all of them, were normally merely visual background noise and nothing more, but now, she noticed, they did not dutifully, humbly regard her passing in hushed indifference but seemed to revolt, rumbling in protest to every footfall, every bang produced by fuzzy slippers beneath doughy feet as tired and worn as her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s, and the rest of the world’s mothers’, which slowed her and triggered a start of clarity, so needlessly intense was her blind execution of righteousness, as charged as if she were tramping off to confront the damned at the gates.

She never truly understood the difference between her childhood and her children’s, though she was aware that the number and gravity of outside influences on children, especially American children, outstripped what her generation had known. “Do unto others,” she felt, was steel-clad and impervious to manipulation: The Crusaders were as evil as the Nazis were as evil as the executioners on Death Row. Father O. and the rest of Immaculate Conception might have argued otherwise but only, she believed, because they were, virtually, backsliders. They may not have been at one time. Sister A. spoke candidly about the rigors of the order and how she had witnessed several strong believers, whom a layperson may have deemed saintly, rationalizing minuscule, natural wavering as an excuse to return to the secular world. But Father O. was interested only in purveying a broad message, one with no intellectual subtleties or complexities to confuse the kids and with clearly defined moral boundaries, and he also was concerned with keeping the church coffers firmly in the black. The Mac, as Immaculate Conception was nicknamed, held a bazaar in the church parking lot for two weeks every summer, and along with about a dozen games of chance, the event also included two craps tables, an over-under wheel, and, in the cafeteria, about two dozen black-jack tables. Evidently, the boy’s mother thought, the message of Luke 19:45-48, in which Jesus set his wrath upon the money-changers, did not apply to the parish to which her family had belonged seemingly forever and to which she had belonged for more than 25 years, dating back to her first Holy Communion, and in whose classrooms 25 years ago the intellectual subtleties and complexities of the dynamic Catholic faith were parsed and permanently illuminated. Why were her children’s generation treated like adults in almost every other facet of life but faith? Their world was almost wholly foreign to her, except for the regular occasions when her sons strut onto their grass or artificial turf stages and, to rapid applause, ran, tossed, and tackled better than everyone else, broadcasting in the loud, brutal, and, to her, nonsensical language of sport that primal quality of which she was infinitely fond: excellence, a higher state of being erected upon the universal notions of talent, patience, duty, perseverance, and practice. But after games, when the boys appeared to her in their silly street clothes, speaking in their silly catch-phrases through the base, noisy holes in their pockmarked faces, and rubbing their sore, muscular but hairless, and fictile limbs, and bore no resemblance to the majestic, uniformed giants on the field, she was returned to confusion, unsure what to say or think or how to feel. Each son had been the ringleader of a troupe of thieves bound in speed, dazzle, and legerdemain, and, their weekly performances transacted, dispensed to anonymity by the mark’s haplessness, a haplessness not entirely without its charms, though. Its intoxicating residues carried the boy’s mother down from bleachers suspended high in the air by rigid algorithms of angled steel braces –– the ground below patrolled by stoic security guards and empty, swirling soda cups, bags of chips, and paper plates, and visible as distant, exotic terrain through the splines behind spectators’ knees –– and propelled her gaily through the chattering, shuffling exodus and to the makeshift waiting area outside the locker rooms, where she and other players’ parents and friends waited excitedly, no matter the game’s outcome, for their children, her memory tipsy on visions of her sons’ swiftly navigating shockingly animated matrices of large, angry bodies and emerging into open space unscathed. Her confusion returned upon the opening of the doors and sight of her boys, especially the youngest, who in the wintry months was rarely separated from a certain denim jacket, its lapels covered in miniature pins, each circle, none any bigger than a quarter, ablaze with the text logo of one of his favorite rock bands. Rush? UFO? Iron Maiden?! Who are these characters? she wondered. She could not have imagined, as a child or even an adolescent, confronting a phrase such as “Judas Priest” without being shocked by fear, and a kind of shame, into convalescing for a few weeks afterward. The boy, her son, not only waived his right to be offended but endorsed the offending words. He brandished them on his favorite garment. He decorated his room with them. He went out of his way to understand them.

The boy’s was the inexorable culmination of three previous, more and more bewildering childhoods, as if L.’s, V.’s, and A.’s had conspired to birth it. By the time the other children had grown, somewhat imperceptibly, into almost-adults, with career ambitions and material desires and grossly uninformed but readily flung opinions, the magnitude of the boy’s present and onrushing future had begun to press heavily down upon her. Relegated to compendiums of yellowed snapshots were simpler displeasures, of L.’s irascibility that led invariably to chipped teeth, missed curfews, and missing cookies, and the uncontrollable, seemingly unprovoked tantrums that contradicted V.’s meek temperament and calm resolve, and A.’s fists, dreaded by his peers and plainly motivated by his potentially demoralizing lisp. The other kids had a warmth, a closeness about them. But the boy emitted a coldness, though his expressions of warmth were manifold and unique. None of the other kids worked with their father, putting up drywall or making wine. None of the other kids even considered for a second, as far as she knew, making their own money –– the boy had a paper route. None of the other kids drew pictures for her. None of the others pestered her for stories about her vacationing with friends in New York City and about visiting Birdland and The Village Vanguard and about her seeing shows by Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Stan Getz, and about hanging out with the Freshmen and the Four Lads when they came to town to do a show. Maybe, she thought, just maybe her distance from her youngest was her fault, the consequence of fatigue or forgetfulness or both.

Other than some of its furnishings –– furniture and carpeting, knickknacks and wallpapering, and the people –– the house had not changed for as long as the boy’s mother could remember. There were a few years right after L. and V. were born when the boy’s family lived in a quaint house in a poor industrial suburb by his father’s parents and extended family. But for most of her life, the boy’s mother was here, treading the same worn linoleum floor panels whose uniform and intricately floral patterns of gold and white conveyed the color of urine unless you were crawling across them and cared to notice, flipping the same worn light switches to the same worn light fixtures, climbing the same worn, clumsy, dog-legged, green wooden stairs out back to reach the same worn second-floor entrance, whose stingy, green porch –– its footprint about the size of a compact car –– sloped viciously, trying its damnedest to spill its occupants over the same worn green railing there and onto the narrow yard’s same worn red-brick latticework below, where weeds sprouted up in clumps in the same old places, by the mouth of the gutter, by the wooden fence between the Brackens on the south side and the chain-link fence between the Savinis on the east, and at the lip of the dark, grimy cubby hole that formed naturally beneath the back stairs’ raised elbow, where a spade, a snow shovel, a pick, and some gardening tools were kept, out in the open and without fear of theft, even though one of the implements, especially Daddy’s handheld spade, was precious, specifically for being the conduit between the boy and the delectable peppers grown by his father, there in the brick yard’s makeshift garden, really just about five wheelbarrows’ worth of topsoil lovingly compacted, cordoned off by bricks upended and jabbed into the ground, and backed by a red-brick wall attached to a huge garage next door and that stretched as long as the entire western run of the yard, from back gate to front, and as high as the second-floor porch, whose view opened up to the flat, empty, tarred roof of the garage, home to a bottled-water company, and the roofs and porches of the shitty houses and apartments nearby, stuffed with groaning, tired, bitching bodies and seemingly perpetually rimmed with dusk and stilled, with the measured stream of cars crossing beneath the street-light at the intersection of Taylor and Liberty all day every day perpetually swallowed by muggy gray shadow, and even the people shuffling in and out of Mellon Bank, Pizza Italia, and the Plaza Theater, and Bloomfield Drug and St. Joe’s, or simply loitering, arrested light and motion like piles of dry shit, all within feet of the tall house near the corner with the white aluminum siding and faded green awnings beneath which the boy’s mother and her siblings jovially watched rain and snow fall or played jacks or collected the mail, only several feet from the potentially fatal traffic and almost always beneath stony adults, who watched over the asphalt where the children chased one another and laughed and squealed, recklessly and naturally, as if they, the soft-bellied and -limbed noisemakers, were already intimate with the noxious weights of their futures, when the world would be greased by the blood of their suffocating commitments and loyalties signed by hands in an attitude of waving in –– for good –– authority and shooing out everything else; jovially watching rain or snow fall or playing jacks or collecting the mail but only to return inside to the same worn floors, the same worn white appliances, the same worn porcelain commodes, the same worn white sinks, and the same worn bathtubs, as part of the same worn life that never ended.

The boy’s life accommodated a similar though heedlessly vernal awareness, kilned by pure facts. That there were houses nicer than his family’s was a fact –– some of them were even on Taylor. That time would not be time were it not a thing fit to be wasted or exploited was a fact. That he wrestled with geometry and video games was a fact. That having a mini-bike would be awesome was a fact. That superheroes existed was a fact. That goodness sometimes went un-rewarded was a fact. That there was no one as exceptional as he was a fact. That the world was cruel despite goodness was a fact. The house’s essence as his family’s house, known and unremarkable, seemed to him as often comforting as constricting: a cramped basement caked with grime that stained his eyes and redolent in grease, two floors of full living quarters, and an attic whose three inhabitants slept, woke, dressed, undressed, dusted, and swept, and jammed to music on the stereo, and dreamed, leafed through comic books and professional wrestling magazines, and read joke books aloud to one another, and painted and sketched fantastical creatures and panoramic, otherworldly mises en scene on paper, and played board games and card games, and whose lone inhabitant on one particular August day strapped on a backpack filled with priceless stolen comic books, stepped out of the window and onto the glistening, black shingled roof, and, to a soundtrack of shuffles, scrapings, and pinchings, shimmied down the concrete gutter encasement –– his fingers and forearms and his knees and feet crackling electrically, his breathing fitful and sharp –– landed on Taylor Street, and flew away.

He’s waving his clipboard, saying, “become a donor,” so I look him right in the eye, and I’m like, “no,” but of course he’s sitting down. I always forget how eye contact is like this substitution. I say, “I’m waiting for someone, please don’t sit down.”

He sits down. What tact! He says, “What are you planning on doing with them?”

What am I planning on doing with them?

Like they’re pajama pants? Perhaps another person needs pajama pants? First of all, no one needs my pajama pants. Second, this is not about pajama pants. This is about our collective ability to kindle a small mystical flame. This guy’s like “snuff it out, inspissated sac.”

We’re the same age, probably. He’s handsome without inner vision.

I ask him, “Are you feeling well?”

“Yeah,” he says.

Where do you feel well?”

When a hand fondles a rosary, where is the spiritual revelation? In the beads or in the hands?

How about the scalp? The scalp is comprised of thousands of unsophisticated mouths (drinking all that shampoo and stuff, so be careful). Each of these has within it a steady tenant. If I consented to give away my scalp (I think what happens after the harvest is you get spooned onto a tray that makes ashes) I’d break open my sacred hoop, evict my tenants.

I ask: “You think you’re just a brain? A brain valve?”

Now the man is walking away from me, off to continue fighting for organs, off to ignore the underlying questions.

Your body bears witness.

If you resist my mystical thinking here, you’re managing to enormously increase your respect for me, the very thing you’re professing to deplore, and I swear to God I don’t even care, because a good perfume always travels against the wind.

Field I:  My Serious Vulnerability To Collisions, Fissures Is Severe

There are others who will say I should go unto Thailand and buy new privates.  Best time to go to Thailand is when it is winter here.  When it is winter here it is not monsooning there.  Raining sheets but not monsooning.  Monsoons would be dangerous to my pre-operative loins.  High winds produce unwanted collisions down below and maybe fissures.  I do not want my privates to anyway resemble the liberty bell.  My works will never be contiguous with Americana.  Americana is sold at gas stations and parkworlds where patriots mill and feed on fables until engorged.  Having my secret urn in any like association makes me want to suck fumes into my hypothalamus and turn light blue.

Diagram II:  If You Don’t Give Me A Bulging Sum I Will Be Forced To Pursue A Nine To Five

Know what that will come to?  It will come to where I’m in a building where cubicles are propagating like the god-sure.  Some Charles with little hair but a thick glaze of hair product is taking me deeper into the ninety-degree angles where a typing test awaits.  I am concerned about my preparedness for the test but if Charles passed it maybe I can.  What if I oiled Charles with five bucks?  Would he help me cheat?  I don’t know if Charles has the power of words.  Everything so far has been nodding and handing me clipboards and hand gestures.  He huffs some.  It might take ten bucks to get traction with Charles.  My globes pendulum and ding.  Charles looks back, annoyed.  Bribery of Charles won’t be possible.  He was spermed by a penis sent due north by recitation of interoffice memo, orgasm was sound of facsimile static, both parties angry on fried drip coffee.

Charles stops short at a junction.  I walk into him out of an eagerness to please that has me following unnaturally close.  Because we are walking at a good clip the collision is not benign.  We knock helmets.  It is audible and very painful to both of us.  I can vouch for Charles’s pain because he sags to his knees and suffers visibly.  I say visibly because he doesn’t moan or comment.  His face, though, turns into a horror mask.  Seconds ago I never would’ve thought Charles could look like he does now.  It is a terrifying display that both sickens me and distracts from my own rapid onset headache.  I tell Charles he is scaring me.  I ask him if he needs me to call someone.  He lies down, putting his face and open, writhing mouth against the carpet, working it.  The carpet is not luxurious, not the kind that welcomes anguished chewing.

Transparency III:  I Will Suffer Quick Autism At A Rough Junction, This Will Be Your Fault

I look around the junction.  There are two choices.  To the left is a colossus wearing a phone headset.  She types and harpoons sashimi.  She talks through her sashimi into the headset.  She is talking about something that gives me autism.  Reparations.  Her tone is astringent, her command of the topic faultless.  It is a conversation that does not invite interruption.  If she was talking about coiffured dogs I would not interrupt her.  Even during this Charles on the floor making monster faces against the abrasive carpet crisis, every cell of me is inclined to keep her out of it.  If she were to look at me I would simply hand her my wallet and walk away.  Suddenly I am horrified that she may look at me and make my commute home problematic.  I turn to the other cubicle.  It quarters an aged man who is either deceased or napping on crossed arms.  I see no signs of respiration but that could be explained by his air puffed suit, obscured face.  I know he was born before the gospel of salves and fevered grooming because the back of his neck is a memoir of lines and stains, his ears thatched.

The hopefully not dead man doesn’t acknowledge my breaching of his cubicle, my quivering assumption of his phone module.   His cubicle is decorated.  There is bunting with questions, aggressive fonts.  “What Would The Company Do?” and “Do You Know Him; That Is, The Company?” and “Are You Saved (By The Company)?”

I dial zero.

Audiospool IV:  Toxic Exposure To Incompetent Larynx Emissions, Rented Giant Threats Will Happen To Me If You Remain Non-Committal

“Grieve.”  It is an unexpected voice.  It sounds like a pre-pubic boy but is probably an adult man or woman who is either toy sized or suffering from pinched sinuses or an incompetent larynx.  Dare the person be standard proportioned but self-pinching their sinuses?

“I need assistance.  Charles needs it.  He is on the carpet.”

“This isn’t Grieve.”

“It’s grave, yes, slightly grave.”

“Who is this?”

“Duane.”

“Duane?  Sounds fake.  What, Fake Name, have you done with Grieve?”

“Grieve is asleep.”

“Not likely.  Grieve is a top producer.  Put Grieve on the phone.”

“Grieve?”  I repeat it several times with increasing intensity while keeping it office appropriate.  Grieve is unmoved.

I’m going to have to touch him.  I’m not sure where to do this.  His arms are a tight pillow for his face.  His head is clear but I don’t want to touch it.  I have a play for his ear, but Grieve’s ears are tangled jungles, hairy hearts of darkness that declare Keep Out.  I decide the move.  I’m going to lightly probe his nearest underarm.  Not the tickle node but just below it.  I take one of his The Company Is Love pens and poke.  There are several layers of office wear to contend with.  I am all the way up to Love before I strike his gills.  First I am gentle.  Grieve doesn’t register gentle.  I try less gentle with a counterclockwise twist into a gill gap.  It is a valley of marshy flesh that begs the pen deeper.  I resist the hunger of his flesh.  Further risks intimacy with organs of Grieve.  I am not an aspiring coroner.  Or to be more optimistic, vivisector.  I am a conscientious objector to vivisection. Ms. Acierto will corroborate.  She tried to conscript me in sixth grade.  I led a small, but staunch campaign for the frogs.  My loyalists and I took the battle all the way to the school board.  I testified, pointing out the heart disease of raising frogs from tadpoles in the winter only to filet them in the spring.  I gave elected officials emotions.  The district bought anatomically correct models and we released our frogs into the suburbs.  It was the last time I was politically active.  I was a different person then.  Or the world was different.  My exuberances are petrifying.  I spend most of my waking hours with a flexed brow.  At night I am a bruxist.  Neither are solutions to the life problem.  My mouthguard is a solution for the bruxism but it turns my mouth into an unsightly jetty and cannot be risked after dawn.

“Grieve is unresponsive.  His flesh, though, is willing.  This may be a good sign.”

“I’m not interested in your imitations of doctor.  Put Grieve on or I’m sending rented giants to your coordinates.  They are officebroken, songful men who love Grieve like a grandfather substitute.   I’m not laughing.”

I ditch the phone against Grieve, propping the earpiece in a vague association with his furred ear.   Grieve is going to have to take it from here.  Because I am unhappy and angry and overwhelmed to a temperature I remember but wish I didn’t.  The gym classes of my yesteryears were the last times I felt such surging inadequacy, dissolution of spirit.   They asked me to do cartwheels and somersaults in front of the class.  My porcelain and lummox breeding made this a grotesque.  Invisible handicaps give no free rides.  Then were the showers.  I saw what they did to the uncircumcised boys.  My ceramic groin would’ve been riotous.  I hid in the toilet stalls performing imitations of complicated bowel movements.

Sketch V:  Spare Me Any Hurt Charles Is Gone Scenarios, Contiguity with George Wallace Risks, Small Writ Gary, Indiana Jeopardies

The floor where Charles is indicated is sans Charles.  Maybe he dragged himself to the next set of cubicles.  Wrong.  Charles is gone.  The woman is looking at me.  Her assessment of me is even more withering than I feared.  She gives me that George Wallace feeling.  I fumble for my wallet, drop it.  This is adverse.  My condition contraindicates quick bending, kneeling.  Movements of the bending, kneeling family are even more loaded when I am stressed.  Stress makes ceramic porcelain brittle.  I use my foot to trap the wallet against her cubicle wall, and using the wall and my clogs as opposition, slowly raise the wallet.  I skid the wallet up the cubicle only to watch it wiggle clear and fall.  I call on the android focus of the imaginary piano recitals of my youth and achieve wallet lift-off.  I am sweating from my sideburns from the effort.  The tributaries of sideburn-born urea descend into the greater watershed of my lower mandible and neck, all of it meeting the cloth dam of my white collar, my tie levee.  I am fast becoming office inappropriate in look and smell.  My shirt, haggled under ten bucks from a street vendor only an hour ago, has chemical properties that render my sweat into a localized heavy industrial draft.  The shirt has become a small writ Gary, Indiana.

I extend my wallet.  “I am, musical groin notwithstanding, a modest man.  But please, accept some recompense of my ancestral shame.  I have a coffee card in there that is near fruition.”

Her eyebrows arch into severe twin peaks as she assesses the gummy red snake my sole left on her ramparts.  Perhaps this and other cubicle drawings will be studied with great interest by futurists, but that is no solace to me now.  There is no time for speculative anthropology or the commitment of field notes to a leatherbound portfolio, one that is perhaps monogrammed.

“Lincoln was my second favorite president…..” I attempt, both afraid to hazard and unwilling to cede my cult of Monticello.  The Jefferson-Hemings finger-fucks by the gazebo, as solicitous and rich with the waft of wisteria as they may have been, were not a simple matter.

Across the sea of cubicles an elevator sounds.  The elevator light illumines.  Muffled largeness and the clicking of what I surmise to be the largest binder clips in Christendom is heard as the door parts.  Out poreth goons singing songs of Grieve.  One of my gonads rings sympathetically with a particularly well-rendered high note.  The goons sing like a prep school a capella group.  Like the sociopath who lovingly tends to a parakeet, their musical prowess is the kind of incongruity that increases terror, augments doom.

Kabuki VI:  Not Binder-Clipped Only Out Of Pure, Dumb Miracle, What Kind Of Life Is This For The Exceptional?

The woman rearranges her legs, exposing passage under her desk.  I look at her to divine if she is a miraculous accomplice or a bounty hunter who seeks favor or promotion with the goons and their masters.  There isn’t time to properly deliberate.  I lower to the floor, cupping my china, and scurry into what is either a trap or a panic room.  I grimace myself into strained reduction as she shuts me in.  Her legs smell wonderfully of ointments, butter and banana-themed.  There are worse smelling places to incarcerate, obfuscate, inhale.

The goons arrive, deem Grieve dead, mourn him in an abridged but affecting manner, and begin to query my captor-protector in melodious, corporate verse.  The goons are fierce, tuneful units of company power.  My protector, however, is a revelation of calm and faux stupidity.  She answers each of their lyrics with phrases that are drained of inflection, bereft of clues.  As she continues to put up a verbal blockade that I will ensure is included in at least one history of our listless decade, she hands me a fuselage of balm.  I cream her calves and ankles with great felicity until the goons’ songs grow faint, subside.

She beckons me out of hiding and points me towards a mode of egress that does not include the elevator.  I tell her she will be remembered until my last pneumonic breath.  Despite my weeping she keeps it professional.  Trembling, I take her advice through the cubicles until I arrive at a doorway notated with a stick figure navigating a series of descending right angles. The stick figure’s torso and leg proportions are poorly rendered.  The stick figure’s legs are way too short.  A stick figure with this physiognomy would have trouble supporting such a long upper body with such legs.  It is safe to say that stair climbing would be difficult if not impossible for such a stick figure.  This stickman would be resorted to crawling.

Placard VII:  Are You Going To Sit Fat, Miserly While I Am Drafted Into An Unjust, Death-Brush With A Zombie?  Really?

The stairwell contains Charles.  Once the door closes behind me he is riotous.  He carries on at decibels suggestive of unanesthetized surgery.  I know because I attended a reenactment of a Civil War battlefield leg amputation.  The re-enactor, a confederate with more bravery than teeth, was commissioned into bray and foam.

“The pain lingers?”

Charles is one landing below.  He wobbles, rages up at me.  His speech is gibberish thick, contrary.  Like a zombie.  It’s hard to argue with a zombie, reason with one.  Hence all the track and field in those zombie scenarios. It’s better to resort to steeplechase than to dialogue with a vindictive nitwit.  Charles, however, was supposed to proctor my typing test.  I should try to negotiate for the yes as they say in the literature.  But will Charles abide the kind of reasoned diplomacy described in literature?

My question is answered by the thrust of Charles.  He thrusts up the stairs with such idiot fervor that he is upon me before I can reason or retreat.  Charles is an enraged idiot.  His recent defeats, it is now visceral, have made him immune to diplomacy. Given that Charles has bloodied my nose and lip and is adopting an overall scorched Duane policy, it is clear I must select a rapid response Save Duane campaign.  The gist of the campaign is to shove the Charles the fuck away from me in a manner that is mostly autonomic, effective in toto.  Charles goes the fuck away down the stairs in a mixed grill of fly, flail, koala-eyes, bassmouth, land, bonesnap, grunt, gasp, and quiver.  The landing fulfills only its basic function.  It lands Charles.  Charles has landed.

Monologue VIII:  Wince On This, I Will Be Sentenced To The Frost-Heaved, Crabgrassed Asphalt Of America’s Backside, Also A War Of Slow Typists, None Of It Good

Landed Charles does not fill me with optimism about the typing test, my fitness for cubicle inclusion.  Even if I was to locate another vehicle to the test, how could I summon the composure to find the home row much less achieve 50 wpm, what I understood to be the minimum benchmark for definition as a modern man.  Perhaps if Charles weren’t so goddamn inert, I might manage 45 to 48 wpm.  His body’s present languor could easily rattle me into the sub-40 range, maybe lower.  I have heard legends about colonies of slow typists, their club-handed largo and its accompanying shame and stigmatization relegating them to monosyllabic, brawling lives in dips, margins, and behind suburban superstores.  I suspect I have seen these slow typists in my peripheral vision on several occasions and their entwined, twisting shadows gave me a surging agita not merely attributable to lunch at the food court.  It would be better to avoid the keyboard altogether than to meet it unprepared and be cast to a life scrambling for ranch dressing packets behind Kmart.

Diagnosis IX:  I’m Durable To A Point, But Let’s Locate Your Wallet

My porcelain birthright, due south of genetic advantage, can be credited with eroding my psyche into a chilly, windswept tundra that repels easy intrusion, further wound.  Such is one of the salutary effects of anomaly.  Just as the blind man savors his immunity to jury duty, I do not overlook the durability hard won by the bearing of a fine art scrotum.  The stall of Grieve, the flight and crash of Charles, however, are not easy intruders on my innermost tundra.  These are cocktail lobbing, arsonist hooligans on my tundra.  As cars burn into carcasses on the tundra, the heat born there initiates slow but steady glacial melt.  The melt builds into fjords and when the banks are insufficient there are waterfalls on my face.  For the second time in a half hour I taste my own salt.  My glaciers are, it seems, brackish.  Add this notion to the slow science of me.

I swell for her palladium of tropical calves.  The banana grove of her legs, though not roomy, would be just the fragrant redoubt I need.  Perhaps she can secret me until close of business and then I can utilize her ability to throw large shadows to darken my escape.  Once on the street I will maintain her shade until there is a sufficient mob.  Then I will release into the mob, allow it to tide me for several blocks, trust it to beach me well away from detection or until there is an appropriately generic theme bar where I can lap mahogany calmatives in the anonymity of denim-shorted, red-boiled Midwesterners. Later I will cull unguents and post them and my pregnant coffee card to her cubicle for thanks.  Though not contingency-proof, this is as good a plan as I can muster.

Scenario X:  Stickman Is The New Nosferatu, The Goats Of My Tundra Will Be Roused, Herded Skittish

My muster lacks.  The plan, at least it’s founding tenets, the first quill of it won’t muster.  I am going to have to re-muster.  Because contingency arrives upon the stairwell.  Actually he didn’t arrive.  He’s been there the whole time.  He’s been watching me from the wall, taunting me to look at him.  It’s the stick figure’s kin.  He resembles the other stickman in that he’s got the hypertorso and the abbreviated leg syndrome but he’s wearing a different face and a haircut where the other was bald.  This one has drawn a dickhead older brother set of mouth and a bulbous unit of hair that trends perm and is among the quickest ways to jerk up a stick figure.  He looks like the kind of pedant brother who puts on middle-aged airs and delivers unsolicited lectures about why your plain white T-shirt is hackneyed.  I experience a rush of empathy for the other stickman.  He would not have had it easy growing up with this crown of foam sidling up to the jam with smirks and nostrums.

Here he spooks the jam, sidles obstructionist, uses one of his hands to point out a “No Re-Entry On This Floor” dictum on the door to my aspired banana grove deliverance.  The dictum, though written, has a phantom auditory effect, playing in my brainpan as a line that clangs, awakes my goats.  There are goats on my tundra.  A high-altitude, liken gnawing herd of them.  This is, per the second stickman catalyst, yet another new discovery.  The last thirty minutes, though my worst by the magnitude of two murder-manslaughter jeopardies, are now officially a golden age of Duane-Sci. The atlas of me has thickened by several sections of technical prose, three annotated diagrams, and a bar chart.

In my present state of tundra insult these goats are vulnerable to the second stickman’s getting, his talent for herding.  He also tries to herd me, his other hand arrowing up the stairwell.  His hands, it should be remarked, are single lines, arrowed off at each end.  It gives the impression of two rappelling hooks. The potency of this stickman as a monster – genetic, aesthetic, attitudinal – belies his simple geometries.  This is a stick figure after all.  I am being gamed, galled by a one-dimensional drawing.  I would not like to meet the artist.  He or she is a far gone exemplar of this environment, incorrigible to the point of foregone, blistering purity. I am convinced the kyphote’s atelier abuts the howling sphincter of this building.  I envision an unbroken procession of inbred, Duane-seeking stickmen issuing from this unhappy caecum.  The stickmen cometh. The stickmen stoopeth, crawleth rather.  They crawleth to conquer Duane.

Video XI:  My Pane Of Cognizance Is Apt To Grow Legendary, Troubling

Overcome by spastic phobia of the army of disproportioned, Duane-adverse stickmen I palsy the latch, power my shoulder once, twice into the steel, cradling my porcelain from glancing.  The door is inviolate.  There is a window in the door, but the glass is rheumy, funhouse.  There are blobs, blots, elusive smears but nothing to compass the view. Is that my lady-conspirator or a bank of printers?  The waning foreign body in the upper left axis could be any of erasure dust, fly, or griffin.  The waxing blur there is telemarketer en route to toilet stall exultation or the vaunted jackalope.   It may be raining packing peanuts or excelsior.  Such is the anarchy of this pane.

A manila sun fixes into the square and slowly draws in.  It betrays properties of a face, but could be a hustle of refraction.  As I squint for reckoning, it rushes forward to be solved, to solve me.  The approximate face is an opaque stew of irregular gaps and densities.  It is the Easter of John Merrick and he will tattle.  Could it possibly be my buttered repo-matron?  Should I attempt to lip-sync a top three plea?  Help or help me or help me please?  Hand pidgin a scheme?  The milk-glass is a translation-poor medium and might alienate our fragile alliance.

Charcoal XII:  The Elephant She-Man’s Orgasm Or Imitation Of Orgasm May Be At My Expense

Painted lips cushion into the glass and come into startling relief.  It is not her.  These lips are soft and well candied where hers were no-nonsense and matte.  These lips are ecstatic and terrible.  Pleasured by an unknown source they mollusk across the glass trailing electric pink smudge.  Their good times can’t be trusted.  Their indulge insults my tough times.  The lips may rend and caterpillar happily in service of forces or agents determined to make me more unhappy.  There is a sucking black field between their margins that advertises neither teeth nor respiration.  Both absences are troubling. The lips’ face remains an inscrutable sump.  Despite the feminine lips it still traffics in the neighborhood of Merrick.  John Merrick has risen, toothless and perhaps transgendered, and found work as a white-collar accommodator.  His lips are beautiful and rapturous and may shortly be used to tell on me.

Another flight is called for.  If I stayed here long enough I may solve any number of legends be it griffin, jackalope or feminine John Merrick, but there isn’t time for proof or bunking of legends and proto-gimps who may or may not have resurrected with sexy, troubling lips.  My lam is calling.  That Charles remains down below in what is either a masterful playing of dead or his remains in every non-recreational, unbecoming of a pratfaller state of being, my lam is rising.

Animation XIII:  Groin, Bomb Of

As I rise from lump or performance of lump of Charles, slip the witness of lips, and put worrying distance between me and my accessory, duty phones.  The duty in question is one that, given my middle accessory, rings loudly and suffers no screening.  I am a special needs evacuator.  Militarily, urologically speaking, a weapons grade incontinent.  When my bladder, which is competent and unexceptional, attains term, there is, out of a previous condition of nap upon the exceptional section of me, an immediacy that humors no colonial.  Failure to evacuate in excess of several minutes and I fall victim to a hive of sensation that Duane, Volume I indexes as groin, bomb of.  There is the rapidly stoking heat, the excruciating, blown-glass like expansion of my art piece. There is the localized britch-bulging, the steam release, and the inner thigh contact burning.  All symptoms in countdown to detonation.  In lieu of these morbidities, taking the seat of eunuch inevitability, I orbit bathrooms, mission to them frequently, and on those occasions when such gravities fail, I am a zealous founder of toilets where none existed prior.  Toilet wildcatting for those with time bomb, fine art privates is risky, grant-worthy.

Diorama XIV:  If You Haven’t Gathered By Now, My Talent Merits A Living Audience, A Non-Stairwell

The present venue has only one audience member and he is one flight below and in no shape for a show.  Though I continue to root, with reservations, for the restoration of Charles to a groggy amnesia, I am glad for his continued inattentiveness.  There remains the threat of John-girl Merrick leading forth an oval of goons.  I rotate away from the pane below, felt my fingers, and unzip my simmering teapot, deliver it to gently to air.  The desert of this stairwell knows its first water.  It trickles and collects in the wide bay of my stance.  Even now I am not immune to my beauty.  Even as newly minted possible killer on the lam my eyes and brow release into rapture.  I empty my teapot according to its slow-pour design, playing it side to side so that it catches meek fluorescence, percolates it empyrean.  The stairwell becomes, for the moment, in fact for the first time since one of its snub-nosed masons sang a homesick, aorta-blowing rendition of Danny Boy, a setting for artistic maximum.

Choreography XV:  A Reunion First Charmed, Auspicious Then Deeply Sad, Tragic, All Of It Owing To A Lack Of Funds

The door below violates into the light show of my number one.  I look down with the face of someone greeting an aspiring rapist.  This face refreshes into that of someone joined in a stairwell by his Marcus Garvey quoting benefactor. I profess she is some kind of wonderful.  She informs that the cubicles are too hot for contrarians and that we must abscond to the roof.  She lumbers against the stairs, shielding her eyes from the blinding cathedral of my peeing.  My excitement is contained only by my desire to finish and cloak before her arrival.  I have shown my art to Chong only.  Dad came in a test tube, mom a casualty of my breech.  Chong curated them into maturity but never leaked.  Even during her stroke howls she stayed off topic.  My romances have never been durable beyond a posing of heads in styles meant to feign interest, costume the ambition to leave the smorgasbord, go home alone, execute a sober succession of solos.  I am no sell-out.  Both venue and audience are chief.  There resides in me a stubborn, if antiquated and grant-needing notion of artistic integrity.  Chong sang underground in red verse.  She was not popular but put fever in the ventricles of the knowing.  This is my standard.

Fortunately her obesity gives me plenty of time.  Punctuating her riot of oxygen debt are brief, sighing interludes in which I detect the first buds of reverence for the reflected talent of me.   I accede these moments of dulcet wheezing may be symptoms of her morbidity, but it is soothing to consider her my first fan.

I finish and hide my teapot.  She does not judge my puddle.  I brief her on my hurl of Charles.  She does not impugn the hurl or its corollaries. If she keeps this up it will soon be time for the third tendering of love in the history of Duane.  We lam together now, her wheezing, now grunting, me scouting for stickmen, occasionally dinging.  The duet of our retreat is not without melody.  It is evocative of much more than shared need.  Romance is in there somewhere, larval, but unmistakable.  I ask her if the Elephant She-Man works on her floor.  She does not register the reference.  I ask if a she-male with gorgeous lips and a face that could halt a convoy is present.  She refers to a woman with innertube lips who was promoted to replace Grieve.  There is no mention of a face grievous enough to sink battleships.  I consider a leading question about jackalopes but reserve it and griffin banter for our hypothetical first date.  I will suggest a diaspora restaurant where utensils are anathema.  Onto the brushfires of the heavily spiced food will be poured several beers.  We will toast Grieve, salute Charles’ assumption of soft-retardation and a demotion to the copy room.  Back at her place a re-fatting of her legs will graduate into a makeout session rivaling, in erotic frisson if not the fear of sniper fire, the Loving-Jeter doggie-styles below the window sills.

We do not make the roof.  We make it to the next landing.  Here there is a stickman apocalypse.  There are several arranged in a picnic scene.  They hover over a pit, spit-grilling one of their own babies.  Several hold cans of cheap domestic beer, smoke from glass bulbs.  One has his hook on his pregnant mate, a thought-bubble from his mouth reads “This one better be a boy.”  I surge with the desire to inhale Aeroflot contrails.

My tacit lady-love does not remark on the cannibal family picnic.  Perhaps because now the din of her climbing exceeds Concorde, bests Niagara.  Her acquisition of oxygen has become an overriding concern.  I query her well-being as she timbers into me like a chainsawed mature gingko.  Her lumber is heavy, Duane eclipsing.  One second I am upright, bodily intact, asking after my heavy breathing love interest, the next pinned fast to the landing, bodily spoilt, needing my no longer breathing love interest off of me.  I produce a bleating complaint that saddens even me.  It is the climactic, aneurysm-giving aria for the opera of Duane, Unfunded.

Aria XVI:  This Outrage Is Completely Preventable

This is, to the extent that I need monies, to the extent that this is a very poor season for arts funding, what a recent afternoon came to.   Just reading about it should inspire a getting out of your checks and a making out of a sustaining, high six-figured check or check series.  This will be no mere tax deduction.  It is a conception.  A deep-thrusting, moan-farming pledge to never let something like this happen again to an artist.  Yes my colossus of love and restitution is dead.  Of course I am damaged by her death timber, my ankles especially, they were timbered badly.  Indeed the stickmen laugh at my expense.  Sure my talent may never be the same.  I don’t see any obvious cracks, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.  At any time my talent could atomize, shards of fabulous privates hailing down my pant leg unto the floor of the city.  There they will be milled into detritus by the footfalls of hedge fund wives, their ugly, bored children.

There may be little consternation among boutique shoppers and their potato-faced, boring offspring about the death of art.  But the blithe consumer’s yawn is for the culture, the climate of living, the zip code in question, an immeasurable atrophy.  And when both the artist and his masterwork is nearly destroyed before it has lit the warming, contagious bonfires of creation, the world bleats.  Fund my porcelain privates and I will show you a shining that not only will obviate this high-pitched whining, but will bring nightly gales of pleasure to a jewelbox of assholes.

http://www.matthewderby.org

But even on the level of a simple conversation, Murphy would not just do the conversation.  Dombal would say something, ask a question or make an observation or just anything, and Murphy might respond, but what he said so rarely corresponded with the initial remark that Dombal often settled for silence.  “What is that song?” Dombal had asked that morning when Murphy put a tape in the tape deck of the Physical Plant van they used to haul the shop vac from dorm to dorm.  “You don’t get to know,” Murphy said and that was it, just a hot, whistling silence for the rest of the trip across campus.  But it was hot by the dumpsters and Dombal couldn’t resist saying, ‘It’s hot,’ and Murphy just looked on at the trash eating his sandwich, the same way he would if there was no Dombal there at all.

“Look at that yeti,” Murphy said instead, gesturing with his sandwich at The Yeti, who was assembling a window-washing nozzle on the soccer field at the bottom of the hill.  The Yeti’s real name was Laura, but on the first day, when all the summer workers got put into teams, Murphy had called her The Yeti and that was the end of the name Laura for her.  She was The Yeti because she was an enormous person, just truly a walking marvel.  Not in a fat way, though she was thick.  It was more of a freakish dialing up of the proportions – hands larger than hands should be, a face broader and squarer than a face should rightfully be.  Only her feet were sized for a normal person, and she wore white canvas slippers that brought her body to a sharp, precarious point.

“Yeah, heh,” Dombal said, looking at The Yeti.

“I’m going to do something to that yeti,” Murphy said.

“Yeah?”  The Yeti made Dombal sick in his gut.  He watched her massive red hands assembling the window washing apparatus and something low and spastic foamed in his heart, like his blood was ice-cold cola.  There were people Dombal didn’t like because of what they’d done to him and then there were people he didn’t like just because of the postures they struck in the world, and The Yeti was in the latter group.  Her very presence in a room stirred up a crazy rage.

“That yeti has something coming to it,” Murphy said.

“Yeah.  Like what are you thinking?”

Murphy forced the last of the sandwich into his mouth, making a sick hump of his cheek, and chewed.

Oki, the janitor at Massassoit House, let Dombal into the building at the start of his shift.  She was an ancient, stooped woman with a silver bowl cut who seemed always to be knitting in front of a small black and white television while water slowly boiled on a hot plate in the Janitors’ Lounge.  Dombal liked Oki because she smiled at him and didn’t ask him questions and didn’t in her countenance make him feel guilty that his life still lay before him like bare parchment before the map is drawn while hers was, in almost every way, already done.

“You on third floor today?” she said.

“I think so.”

Dombal shouldered his vacuum and his tool bag and took the elevator to the third floor.  He found Murphy in the first dorm room, already asleep.  Dombal took the elevator to the fourth floor because removing the grilles from the heating units was a loud and messy process and he didn’t want to wake Murphy.  He entered the room that faced the elevator.  The walls were yellowed and smudged, lit by the twin slim windows that let out onto the quad empty quad.  Squares of tape and corkboard riddled the surface of the walls, furred with loose drafts of carpet pile, human hair, stray ash. Dombal put his tool kit on the bare mattress and removed a screwdriver and a rubber mallet.  The grille had been painted over several times – He could barely make out where the screws were.  He centered the tool over the area where he guessed the center of the first screw head was and pounded with the mallet until he broke through and gained purchase.  Sometimes this process damaged the grille, sometimes irreparably.  But he was already doing another person’s job and he wasn’t happy about it, so if the grille broke it was not his fault.

Dombal drove out the screws one by one, leaning into the handle of the screwdriver with all his strength as he twisted.  When he finished, his hands tingled as if being pelted with sparks.  The blades of the heating unit were draped with a mat of gray dust.  He sucked this away with the vacuum, exposing the delicate copper apparatus which was like the spine of a prehistoric snake.  Something went into the vacuum that was not dust and the vacuum clogged.  He looked into the nozzle of the vacuum and saw a lump of red fabric.  He used the screwdriver to tease it back out through the mouth of the nozzle.  It was a woman’s silk panty, red with orange stripes.  He unfolded the underwear on the floor.  It was still relatively clean.  It must have fallen behind the heating unit only recently.  Dombal picked the underwear up and held it in his palms.  It seemed impossibly small.  He thought about the person who wore the underwear, and how she might have inhabited them, how much space she took up in the world.  There was a dimensionality to bodies that didn’t translate well from the photographs and illustrations he used for masturbation.  He saw something move out of the corner of his eye and turned.  It was his reflection in the floor-length mirror that was bolted to the dorm room’s door.  He saw himself kneeling on the floor, holding the underwear.  He stuffed the garment beneath the mattress and continued to the next room.

At lunch Dombal went to the vending machine to get Million Dollar Bash, which was a plastic bag filled with nuts and dried fruit and chocolate drops.  It was the only thing left in the vending machine, but this was no big deal because Dombal happened to like Million Dollar Bash.  He usually found enough loose change in the heating units to buy one bag a day, which he ate silently on the bottom bunk in one of the empty dorm rooms, handful by handful.  He put the change in the machine and pressed the buttons and the corkscrew that held the bags of Million Dollar Bash turned, moving them forward in graceful orchestration.  As the corkscrew turned, Dombal saw Murphy reflected in the vending machine’s glass surface.  He was sitting on a table in the lobby, talking to The Yeti.  The frontmost bag of Million Dollar Bash dropped into the receptacle and Dombal reached through the spring-loaded door to retrieve it.

“This is just what Bill told me.  All the mattresses, down to the lobby,” The Yeti said as Dombal approached the table.  She gave off a dense, yeasty smell.

“Down here, in the lobby.” Dombal said.

“All of them.”

Dombal looked at Murphy, who just stared out the window at the abstract steel sculpture in the quad, baseball cap pulled down over his brow.

“Why?”

“They’re getting replaced.” The Yeti whipped a sash of her straight colorless hair over her shoulder and then stroked it as if to apologize.  “We bring them down to the lobby and next week they bring dumpsters.  Then later, the new ones come.”

“What about the vents?”

“They said the vents can wait,” The Yeti said.  “The mattresses need to be down.”

“Who said this?  About the mattresses.”

“I told you.  This was Bill.  Speaking directly to me.”

“Bill?  He came here?”  Dombal had not seen Bill since the start of summer session, when he gave a brusque demo of the shop vac in a full University-themed track suit.  Dombal had stopped thinking about the Physical Plant staff altogether except as a sort of ghostly cabal, hovering invisibly and shapelessly above the dormitories.

“Let’s get this over with,” The Yeti said, clapping her hands together and rubbing them.  Dombal and The Yeti started across the lobby but Murphy continued to sit on the table.

“Come on,” The Yeti said.  Murphy did not respond.  “Are you seriously not going to help?” she said with a sense of naïve wonderment that seemed momentarily to shake Murphy.  He pulled at the brim of his cap and slid down off the table, deliberately looking away from Dombal and The Yeti as he approached.

The mattresses were gray and slick, threadbare ellipses worried into their midsections, the mark of semester after semester of muted couplings and studied, repetitive groinwork.  Faint impressions of menstrual spotting, Rorschach pissmarks.  Dombal and The Yeti worked as a team, each taking hold of one end and scuttling down the halls like crabs.  When they reached the stairwell they would hoist the mattresses over the guardrail and let them fall. Murphy worked alone on the first floor, thrashing and pounding the mattresses down the hall.

After two hours they’d only managed to move nine out of two hundred and forty mattresses into the lobby.  Murphy spread out on one and shut his eyes.

“Lazy,” The Yeti said.  Murphy opened one eye and then shut it again.

“Let’s get the rest,” Dombal said, heading toward the stairwell.

“Are you always this lazy?” The Yeti called out to Murphy.  He smacked his lips and rolled over onto his stomach.  His basketball shorts came down a little when he moved so that his crack was showing, but it somehow looked okay.

The Yeti stood at the threshold of the foyer, waiting for Murphy to respond.  Dombal started to climb the stairs.

When Dombal got to Massassoit House the next morning the mattresses were rearranged.  They had been stacked into a kind of fort.  Six mattresses on their side and three draped on top.  Dombal walked around the perimeter of the structure.  It looked sturdy.  It looked like someone had put some amount of time and effort into its construction.  The mattresses were slightly parted on one side and Dombal approached to have a look but as he crouched at the opening he heard a sound.  A rough, scattered breath, issued from high in the throat, choked off in mid-exhalation.  Dombal rocked forward slowly, pressing his knuckles into the stiff carpet pile for balance.  The breathing stopped.  Dombal went rigid.  He could actually feel the blood rushing through his ears, sloshing like a riptide.  The breath was gone for a long time, and then it erupted again in earnest, rhythmic and fierce.  He crawled silently toward the aperture, which glowed faintly from the inside.  The breathing took on a raw whistling overtone.  Dombal put his cheek against the wall of the cavity and peered in.  He saw the thickset curve of The Yeti’s right buttock, clutched in a percussive spasm against Murphy’s prone leg.  Dombal knew it was Murphy because of his green striped athletic socks and blown-out Keds. Stretched impossibly across The Yeti’s pinched behind, strapped there like a tourniquet, was the pair of red and orange underpants that Dombal had found behind the heating unit.  The pair that he’d held in his hands.

Dombal pivoted slowly and sat on his haunches to wait it out.  There was nobody in the hall and nobody in the quad.

“Hey.” It was Murphy, calling from inside the hut when they were finally done with the thing.  Dombal turned and saw Murphy’s naked arm extended through the opening.  He held a five-dollar bill between his index and middle fingers.  “Go get two Cokes and a Million Dollar Bash.”

Dombal took the bill and walked down the hallway to the recessed vending area.  He made change for the five.  Coins spilled into the pebbled metal dish.  Dombal scooped up the coins and approached the machine that had Million Dollar Bash.  He saw his reflection in the glass.  There was more flesh on his head than he remembered or wished to remember.  He put the coins in the machine and pressed the keys and the corkscrew turned, moving the cellophane bags along the track.

“You made a nice house,” Oki said, looking away from Dombal so that he knew she did not think it was a nice house at all.  She was frying something on the hot plate, a sort of egg with red sauce.

Dombal took his tool bag from the utility closet. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Bill came here.  He didn’t like it.”

“Bill?”

“Bill.  The manager.”

“What did he say?”

“He say he didn’t like it.  You need to take it down.”

Oki looked up at Dombal.  Her face was old and theatrical.  She went back to her task, batting the pale mashed egg around in the saucepan.  Dombal looked in his tool bag to make sure everything was there.  He closed the bag and took the elevator up to the first floor lobby.

There were more mattresses, maybe seventy-five of them, piled high in the space in an intricate pattern.  The structure had the feel of a Sumerian ziggurat, its peak grazing the acoustic tile of the drop ceiling.  It seemed to have at least two levels, the higher of which could be accessed by a graded staircase made from mattresses that were stacked and staggered with an architect’s precision. The structure had a look of real permanence, as though it had been built thousands of years in the past.

Dombal just stood and looked at the structure for a long time.  His heart was beating so fast that he almost fainted.  He wanted to jump up and give a flying roundhouse kick to one of the towers.  He waited to hear a sound but there was nothing.  He moved closer to the staircase.  There wasn’t any person or any sound.  He put his foot on the first step.

“Hey.”  It was Murphy’s voice.  Dombal looked down the hall. Murphy was struggling with a mattress that had doubled over on the landing of the central stairs.  “A little help?”

Dombal put down the tool bag and walked over to Murphy.

“Fuckwad.”

“What?”

“Fuckwad.  What I said.”

Dombal grasped the white twine handles sewn to the sides of the mattress and the two of them lifted it just high enough so that it grazed the surface of the rug.

“Where’s that Yeti,” Dombal said as they scuttled down the hallway toward the temple.

Murphy looked up and nodded toward the entrance.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Dombal said.

“I’ll show you.”  They got to the temple and Murphy dropped his end.  He climbed the stairs and, halfway up, made a little sweeping gesture with his hand that meant Dombal was to follow him.  They went in and padded down a dark corridor.  At the end of the corridor there was a small open space.  The Yeti lay inside, on her side, unconscious, wearing only an enormous pair of emerald, silken underpants and a white cotton bra.  Her feet were bound at the ankle.  In the opposite corner of the room there was a heap of empty candy wrappers, crushed Million Dollar Bash bags, Coke bottles, a half-eaten bag of carrots, a jar of mayonnaise, and a shallow bowl of water.

“What is this?” Dombal wanted to back out of the room but the moment to do so came and went and he was still standing there, looking down at the Yeti sleeping on the stained mattress, all tied up.

“You asked where she was.”  Murphy knelt behind the Yeti and put his hand on her thigh.

“Is she okay?”

“She sleeps in.”

“You – you sleep here?”

“I’ve been.  Yeah.”

The Yeti breathed evenly in her sleep.  Her face was as still as a night garden.  There was no other sound in the small room.

“I don’t – What’s happening.”

Murphy stood up.  “Just help me carry some more mattresses.”

“She’s okay, though.”

“Yes, fuckwad.  This is what she wanted.  She asked for this.”  He slid past Dombal and disappeared down the corridor.  “Come the fuck on, twat,” he called out over his shoulder.

Dombal looked at the Yeti.  Her breasts pooled unevenly in the massive brassiere.  Her mouth was slightly open.  He wanted to kick her in the gut.

They went up the stairs to the top floor.  Murphy had yanked all of the remaining mattresses out into the hallway, where they lay slumped like victims of a gas attack.  Without speaking they lifted the mattresses by their handles and hauled them to the stairwell.

“Why are you doing this?” Dombal asked.

“I’m bored.”

“You spend all day with that Yeti.”

“I guess I’m really giving it to her,” he said and it was the first time he had ever agreed with something Dombal had said.  He grinned in the dry aftermath of the sentence like a fox with a quail in its mouth.

“It doesn’t seem like you are,” Dombal said in a wispy voice.

“Huh.”

“You’re just spending all your time with the Yeti.  Like, sleeping with the Yeti, the whole day.”

“What’s your point, twatstick?” Murphy dropped his end of the mattress.  It sagged on the landing.

Dombal’s every muscle was taut.  He wasn’t able to say anything.  Time slipped by like the particles of dust briefly illuminated by the tall windows flanking the stairwell.

“What is your point?”

Dombal dropped his end of the mattress and walked down the corridor.  Halfway down, he realized that the only other way off the top floor was the fire exit, so he turned into one of the empty dorm rooms and sat on the steel frame of one of the beds.  The springs grated and snapped under his weight.  Someone had scratched an impossibly long penis into the brown paint along the length of the frame.  Dombal stared at the illustration and waited for Murphy to come in and start whaling on him, but he couldn’t hear anything but the sprinklers jetting rhythmically over the lacrosse field.  He waited for what seemed like a really long time for Murphy’s fist to find his head or his chest or wherever Murphy saw fit to whack him but Murphy did not appear.  Dombal’s face tingled with the anticipation of the blow.  He lay back on the frame and the springs dug into the base of his skull, trapping tufts of his hair in their tight coils, and he stiffened out and waited in the room for as long as he could stand to.

The next morning Dombal went to the Physical Plant building.  Bill’s office assistant let him in and told him to sit in the narrow, walled-in waiting area.  She took a phone call while he paged through a weekly magazine, reading nothing of its contents, his tacky fingers warping the paper.

The assistant placed the receiver in its cradle and called Dombal into Bill’s office, which was an arid, cream-colored room without windows.  Vendor calendars hung on the far wall, grimly designed documents top-heavy with photographs of women in puffed hair breaking up concrete with slick jackhammers.  Bill sat behind a steel desk and listened without blinking as Dombal told him about the mattresses and what went on inside.  Bill’s face lacked dimensionality.  It was as if all of his features were spread out on a single plane like a Mercator map.  He sat in his chair and took in Dombal’s report with the focused earnestness of a deacon.

“Is that all you can think of?” Bill asked when Dombal stopped talking.  “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“I want a cordless screwdriver,” Dombal said in a thin, crackling voice.

“Pardon?”

“My hands hurt from taking apart all those heating units.  I am awake half the night in pain.  I want a cordless screwdriver.”

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

Dombal got up and walked out of the Physical Plant building.  He flinched in the sunlight, expecting to see Murphy in the quad, running swiftly toward him with a bat.  But there was just the piping heat radiating from the blacktop.  He took the long way around campus but even so he saw the ambulance careen through the narrow paths that led to the dormitory block, escorted by two squad cars.  His gut steamed, so he took the dirt path up the hill to the convenience store and bought a large ice beverage and sat at the lone table by the window to drink it.  The spoon for the beverage doubled as a straw.  He pressed his left fist into his right palm to stanch the dull roaring ache.  He had the striped underpants balled up in his pants pocket but he didn’t know yet what he would do with them.  A customer entered the convenience store and bought a snack stick.  Dombal spooned up a heap of the ice beverage and held it against the roof of his mouth until the customer left.  The day would be stupid and hard, and would take the endurance of a mountain climber just to endure.

One wet day’s end you were tailing a guy through here who you thought might be Mister Big. You’d been having a few in Loui’s, talking with Joe the bartender about the meaning of life, Joe’s view in sum being that life was full of sickness, loneliness, corruption, cruelty, paranoia, betrayal, murder, cynicism, impotence, and fear, and then there was the dark side. You realized that what was wrong with Joe was that he was a teetotaler.

Across the room at a dining table sat a fat guy in a white linen suit with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, delicately putting away the back half of a cow. Rings on all his fingers, even his thumbs. He looked familiar. Joe didn’t know who he was but said he was a loner who came in from time to time to eat a few dinners. Probably you’d seen him in here before. Joe thought he might be a thin guy disguised as a fat guy.

Maybe. But he sure eats like a fat guy. Everything but the tail and horns.

He sometimes has those with cheese and coffee, Joe said.

On a hunch (a hunch is to a gumshoe what a skirt is to a letch: a tease; pursuit; trouble), when he lit up a cigar, paid, donned his panama, and left, you decided to step out into the drizzle and follow him. You knew zip plus toy soldiers about Mister Big, but you figured it was likely his nickname was for more than power alone. Even if the guy was only a mock-Mister B, it might be interesting to see where he goes, and you’d have something to report to the widow next time she turned up. At first you were on the street, watching in the classic surveillance manner his slow waddling movements in the reflections of shop windows, but then at some point you were in the alley. How that happens is almost always a mystery. You have privileged access to it down your back stairs, maybe everyone does, but if you step out the front door the alley is hard to find. You can’t see it and then, what do you know, you’re in it. The fat man in the panama and linen suit zigzagged along, never looking back, but you had the feeling he knew you were back there, paddling through the garbage, trying to pretend you were just out for your daily constitutional. It was probably time to forget it and turn around, but you weren’t sure where you were and were as likely to find your way out going forwards as backwards. And, besides, the more you followed him, the more convinced you were that this was the guy you were looking for. He was moving faster and faster, he maybe ate like a fat man but he moved like a thin man, maybe Joe was right, it was hard to keep up. Finally, he was running flat out, pivoting sharply around corners like a mechanical carnival target on ball bearings, hopping nimbly over obstacles, darting down narrow passageways, somehow skirting puddles that you splashed through, a pale luminosity flitting through the moist shadowy alley like a will-o’-the-wisp, and soon you were only catching fleeting glimpses of him in the distance and then you lost him altogether.

You leaned against a boarded-up door to get your breath, torch a fag. Where were you? No idea. But you could hear rustlings, knew you’d been had, knew your situation was dangerous. You’d pocketed what remained of the widow’s roll for operating expenses (Blanche on the phone rolled her eyes and shook her yellow curls) and though you’d blown some of it in Loui’s there was plenty left and you worried now about getting mugged, or worse. These guys could smell money like sniffer dogs, even in the rain, and they usually preferred to ice their victims rather than merely threaten them, as it gave them more undisturbed pocket-poking time. The alley branched out in five or six directions from here, mostly you supposed into rat-infested dead ends where killers lurked. Your .22 was back in the office; you had nothing to defend yourself with except your fists. Glancing around for a weapon of some sort, your eye fell on a big ivory coat button and, keeping your back to the wet wall, you snatched it up in case you ran into Mad Meg. Beyond it was an old yellow tennis ball soaking in a puddle, and beyond that a red plastic swizzle stick. The swizzle stick was in front of what looked at first glance like a back door, but turned out to be a low underpass into another dark tangle of alleyways. A brass button off a military coat, a knotted shoelace, another bald tennis ball, a green-and-gold candy wrapper. These objects might have fallen out of Meg’s bagged household effects as she passed through here, or she might have dropped them on purpose. Either way, following their trail was your only shot. At the very least, if you came upon her, you could maybe wrestle the kitchen knife away from her, use it to fight your way out of here. It was a kind of scavenger hunt, chased by muffled footsteps, tumbling ashcan lids, the squawk of a startled cat being kicked.

Suddenly, picking up a pair of crimson-and-blue ice-skate shoelaces, you found yourself in a blind alley. A trap? An aluminum candy wrapper lay like a lottery ticket in front of a puckery patch of wet asphalt. There was a day-glo orange tennis ball, bright as fresh fruit, beyond the patch in front of the windowless brick wall that closed off the alley, but on your left, closer by, between two battered ashcans standing like woebegone sentries, lay a swizzle stick with a little flag on it that you remembered giving her. Mad Meg had saluted it, then picked her nose with it. You chose that over the orange ball, and as you stooped to pick it up, a red-eyed assailant in old army fatigues came charging out of a shadowy hole in the opposite wall with a switchblade. Oh shit. You braced yourself, yanking one of the ashcans in front of yourself, but when the guy stepped onto the puckery patch, that was as far as he got: his feet stuck, sank, the asphalt sucking him down, his screams smothered by the falling rain. There was a final wet sucking sound and your attacker was gone, nothing left but the switchblade and the echo of his final curse. You skirted the patch to gather up the orange tennis ball, saw the pink cloth-coat button in the mouth of the hole in the wall whence your attacker came, crouched down, picked it up, and crept through.

You were in the alleyway behind your office building. You left your collection of memorabilia in the hole along with a button ripped from your own trenchcoat and the switchblade. All right, it made Meg all the more dangerous next time she rushed you, but you owed her as much.

§

Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

equipment, personnel, ad revenues, sky scrapers, almost ate me up. Key thing. Twenty-four news network, bury yourself, don’t get

no harness could hold him, prevent his little neck from snapping, she found herself an unscrupulous harness dealer, even he refused, she doubled and redoubled, soon six figures for a damn parachute harness, by no means a low six. He gave way as they all do, the wife indemnified him and took to the sky with our baby, crashed square in a pumpkin patch, neck snapping on impact, or before, in midair. Boy dead on impact, or before, perhaps, little heart bursting, perhaps. More than one way to take the wife’s later description of the sound. So peaceful, she said, snap the most peaceful snap possible. Our son perhaps gone already. Changes everything, crucial fact changed, snap not the same snap, no way of knowing. What delicious soup. After the tragedy, the burial, surrendered herself full-time to the exploitation of the corpse, most obscene goddamn

paid her deeper into the art game, AIDS-charity game, worked for a time, stifled her tastelessness. New toys, me with my own. Hocked the theaters, Obie awards, built ground-up a 24-hour cable news network, dandy new toys, none of it enough. Art game, AIDS game, news cycle. The wife back at the corpse, wailing at her misfortune, hers, mark it, nasty ululations, pseudo-spontaneous histrionics, express purpose bringing low all within earshot. Be warned, you, sir, and your Tanya, now within the perimeter of ululation, our wives descending, fourth cellar, and you and I at this table, and the high windows, and the chandelier, and Granger and Kidd, a locked

small, dried-out, bent and gravely crippled southern Italian men, with the family for generations, subjected me to heinous childhood rituals. Thought all that hidden from my parents, but growing up, gathering evidence, shoveling bullshit, the will at last to see what it had truly been. All these rituals expressly commissioned by

day in, day out, ululations. Couldn’t abide, left home, the beeches, sycamores, paintings of Granger and Kidd, hell out of Dodge. Disappeared for weeks at a time, news game, those vipers and cocksuckers, home shorter intervals, more and more among vipers and cocksuckers, finally left the Copper Beeches for good, hearth and home, childhood goddamn home, The Pentecost and Untitled #43, projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, all that behind me. Buried myself in advertisers, personalities, affiliates, going concerns, cocksuckers, vipers, every step dragging. Copper Beeches, childhood home, abandoned it to the wife’s ululations, those wails that shook bedrooms, libraries, first and second cellar, goddamn unending screams refracted in the accelerator of her toxic self-regard, up to such a pitch of horror, so many thousand decibels, that the last of our servants, the sorriest old pricks, the ones hadn’t fled, such disgust, at the boy’s death, smashed locked doors, scrambled through screens they’d slashed, literally ran for the hills, and me not there to wrestle them back. Pieced it together after, came home at last, rehired them, same pricks, double, triple salary, wrestled them back, still others back on their own, frail, flailing at the door

dropped like flies, ancient servants, to leave, to return, too much, did them in, all but the valet, also his daughter, such a precious baby girl, what delicious soup, eat goddammit. Ignore the wrenching of planks and mortars, the crash

silence in the Italian and African marble, cobalt and amber mosaics, the projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, silence there, ribbed vaults, mahogany tables, panels of goddamn ivory damask, all buffeted by oceanic silence. The beeches in the high blue windows, and a cold piss reek

your wife, her contractions closer, delicious soup, please try

creaking in the south wing. Pay no attention. As though foundations were precipitously

rubbing alcohol with food coloring, mashed together acids, bases, foodstuffs burnt and ground with unsanitary pestles, injected these deadly stews into the arms of North Africans, our scientists came to us addicted to painkillers and left in

Theatre, those triumphs, even all that, the faggotry, the Obies, so much, just so much bullshit, would’ve been devoured, news game, lacked the will for it, if not for the son, his death, and the wife’s ensuing ululations. The hell out of

back again at last, Copper Beeches, first night back, a year ago today, first night, such silence, stench, such piss and suicide, the wife dead at last, I thought, had to be suicide, she’d never up and abandon her childhood home, nor find the will to shut down her ululations, should have said my childhood home, but that’s not it either. Copper Beeches our shared childhood home

echo of an echo, each night

Mother, father, me, here in the mansion, she and her father over the garage, the Mechanic’s House, we called it, her father a mechanic, then a suicide, still after his death we called it the Mechanic’s House, not the Suicide’s House. Spied through bedroom window, tits in profile, bigger by the year, opera glasses, the two of us children, just think, two children, running among the sycamores, then our crawl space where the Second Nocturne hissed. Our hand-crank record player, she wouldn’t have abandoned all that. And the stench in the foyer, lounge and conservatory, rotting meat. Perhaps a human stench, a human rot

and you and your Tonya, stranded on the mountain these months, your Pullman car. No more shivering, you’re home at last. Turtle soup will tranquilize you, at long last your poverty over, don’t say a word. Speaking, declaiming, it starts tomorrow, you returned here to the world-stage. You, your wife, Tonya, here again for new Obies at last, though only you will be acting, your wife, the life gestating inside her, the contractions, she will

demanded it, brought you back, that my wife might once again take on Melinda

16^th-century opera glasses, straddled a branch near the garage, the Mechanic’s house, the tape is running. Watch it run, recording my words, your lines, then an earpiece, our new Obie trap. You me, valet you, my speech, your silence, soon your speech, his silence, every night recorded, two tapes alternating, degrading at the

first night back, wife alive, found her at last, silent, perched on the bed, pearlescent white slip gathered at thighs, no blouse, socks or hairnet. A view of my wife. Tits in profile again, these weeks or months alone had beautified her, indecent. Such goddamn indecency. This the most discernable in the onrush of feelings. Hairline, face, rack, knees, ankles, toes, profile-view, like children again, indecent, grisly. And, second chain of associations, less visceral but in retrospect perhaps

and fear. Turtle soup quiets her. She escorted your Tanya through the trapdoor, my wife, shell in hand, escorted your pregnant wife down, second cellar, third cellar, down. Such silence. See how well I’ve arranged things. Arrangements always my forte, you must remember. Your star turns in Mother Earth and Hot-L Baltimore, as theater producer I was the past master, not of the art, but the arrangement, halt the rehearsals, you remember now, undercutting the director, not a lick of goddamn shame, usurping prerogatives, a leap onto stage, rearrange your bodies, hauling this way and that, working arms, legs, into improbable combinations, then at last a tableau of breathtaking rightness. Always the lowest possible opinion of the actor’s art. Took on the producer mantle, actors my mannequins, I called them that, my stop-motion mannequins, all actors can hope to be, stop-motion mannequins, what’s required, soon you and your wife came to understand, full surrender to the master-arranger, nothing

world-wide declared you best husband-wife duo, O’Neill, yes, and Strindberg, Chekhov,  triumphs all, such art, such triumph, such bullshit, I hired you, put you in your place. The master’s arrangements counterintuitive, physically excruciating, tendons pushed to breaking, then past, crack of sinew, vast dark stage resounding in your submission, never relent, you soon came to understand. Broke you of your stage-art, stage-faggotry, broke you down, took you apart, my tools first bags of money, then arrangements, I changed you from grotesque actor-artists to stop-motion mannequins, shook you like peach trees, what showered down wasn’t juicy peaches but Obie

wife insisted, clean break. Sent you packing, you and your Tonya, not your child. Took your baby, your first baby, made him ours, our first baby. World-historical thespians, now broken-down, worthless. Closed the theater, pawned the Obies, my wife planned love-activities, bonding activities, snorkeling, rock-climbing, base-jumping with our first baby, the one we’d stolen, it’s not we, not this time, who will raise him, this time me, second boy just me alone, 3^rd cellar, his quarters, 4^th cellar, our wives, if they live, even now a new boy, about to be born, or being

barren wife, should’ve known

day by day, year by year, until it snaps, then cellophane tape, spliced and

my first boy, now dead, but then, his living days, to scrape your Tonya from his skull, feel that love, that open-heartedness, as idealized by Melinda Gates, she planned love-activities. The wife, how she needed to feel such love, enwomb him, base-jumping, para-sailing, stegophily, that she might see Melinda Gates through the child, and the child through Melinda Gates, to feel that openness, that love

night she dreams Melinda Gates, the wife finds Melinda Gates’ thumbprints everywhere. Spotted Melinda Gates at the reservoir, wife behind a stroller, my first boy, not dead yet, me at the wife’s side, or just ahead, beside the stroller, the wife behind it. Melinda Gates jogged towards us, white sweatbands gleaming, wrists, forehead, all white. Melinda Gates paused, jogged in place, complimented the wife on our baby, I should say our dead baby, that first baby, not yet dead, no, not yet. A time when my boy, when he wasn’t, you see, when he wasn’t dead, and at the compliment of Melinda Gates, the wife’s jaw, no other way to say it, hung ajar. This jaw-event, it extended beyond your normal case of shock, case or nerves, wife a corpse, Marley’s ghost, binding-scarf undone, skull and mandible blown apart, I had to laugh. Stared, perverse fascination, at last as she really was, a goddamn corpse, dangling jaw, Melinda Gates to thank, our first Melinda Gates encounter, the absolute life in Melinda Gates exposed the absolute death in my wife, I chuckled, touched the hand of the baby, of the dead baby, rushed Melinda Gates, shook her hand, furiously pumped the arm, caressed the sweatband, thanked her for at last exposing my wife, shuffling corpse-meat contraption, no hope for her at last, grisly

huge mastiff, he tunneled so good, blocked escape, that mountain, that Pullman car, your avalanche, your true home, these months, coming to term, as if escape were even

reason for the summons, the telegram, 32 weeks ago today, no inkling of that. Such knowledge by grim necessity ruthlessly and unconsciously suppressed, you and your wife smiling like jerks, seats of plush velvet, first-class passage already booked, years of brutal, near-fatal emmiseration behind you. Actor’s art long abandoned, more soup

Obies soon to glint, second cellar, appurtenances and drainage holes, while, fourth cellar, the wives free to ululate, I will take the boy, the new boy, leave the wives, the valet will bring them turtle soup, this will silence them. Turtles now an endangered species, thanks to the wife, her turtle-hunger, turtle-mania, my wife deep down with your wife, fourth cellar, two wives, their new living quarters, you soon in second cellar, the theater I’ve constructed, my star, my wretch, emmiserated to the point of death, I broke you down, sent you packing, waited years, then, via telegram, called you back. Buried you halfway here on the mountain, left you stranded, you and your wife, Pullman car, a life gestating inside her, freed you just in time, your wife now fourth cellar, her labor, her ululations, my wife’s beside her, my wife’s ululations beside her, now again your child will be my

The Pentecost. And our two wives, dead or alive in the fourth cellar, my new child playing in the corner of the third cellar, plastic horses, safe from

Sent private dicks to monitor your love rituals, record her sleeping temperature, monitor her cycles, at last the moment came, a telegram

first night, weeping, the wife stroked my face, this is not it can’t you see that it’s just not it anymore. I said, we’ll get the servants back. Said I’d change, listen, love her again, the two of us children again together, I’d find again for our nocturne, our hand-crank record player, amongst all the rubbish, and I searched and searched

opted for a week facing Kidd, travel a mile in my wife’s shoes, not only excruciating but psychically destabilizing, the wife swapped out Kidd paintings nightly, Untitled #18 for  Untitled #5, Untitled #77 for Untitled #18, eyes that

that halt, Pullman car high on the mountain, an avalanche of my own arrangement, your wife came to term, every courtesy shown, no service denied, you could not leave or kill yourselves, that was all, eight months, your mountain, your Pullman car, then onto  the Copper Beeches, this dining room, turtle soup,  trap door below, other doors locked, Baccarat chandelier suspended above, paintings of Granger and Kidd, a locked room

shrugged off the throng of porters, threw out elbows, one telegram and you came running, you and your Tonya ideal assholes, suitcases empty, you saved room for cash money, bags of money you imagined awaited you here, and which do in fact await you, in the telegram no mention of cash money, studiously avoided it, but between the lines, that studiousness pressed to breaking, something gleamed, like money, wouldn’t you

each day erase your memory, sharp crack to the skull, revolver’s butt

first night, pearlescent, profile-view, an understanding, Hello Roger, she said

judge from the crash, your eye tracking down, the sconce below Kitt Kidd’s Untitled #43 broke free. Won’t glance back, even now, never look back at Kidd’s work. Kidd behind, Granger in front, the Baccarat chandelier dozens of meters overhead, it will not fall. You and I together again, Limoge porcelain and green-fired Meissen porcelain, silk jacquard table cloth, high windows spilling blue light, or sepia, sun falling through different panes, hours pass, a multiplicity of panes configured just so, always a single color, blue or sepia or dull white light, depends on the hour. Blue now, soon dull white, then sepia at last. And mirrors to reflect our light downward, ingenious cellar mirrors, thus did my parents arrange things here at Copper Beeches, no reason to part with it, keep the finest traditions, eliminate the rest, blue light dropping through the traps door to the first cellar, valet perched between second and third, the darkness there, turtle shell pressed conchlike to lips, at ululations or screams he’ll signal with a

The Pentecost. And our two wives, dead or alive in the fourth cellar, a new child to play in the corner of the third cellar, plastic horses, safe from

miss him so goddamn much, I miss my boy, so much.

something of the actor’s art. It burned in the infant’s eye, faint but true, would have had to break him down if not for the wife, pumpkin patch, an end to all that. My boy no actor, you see, a news cycle boy, that empire. My scion, not yours. But the actor’s art, genetic faggotry, you tainted him, I think, this new one free of the taint, he’d better be

first night, her bedroom, at last I saw it, a turtle shell. She lifted it, sipped. I understood how she’d survived, floor parqueted in turtle shells, living turtles, dead turtles, must have blockaded herself in, then survived on turtles, she returned the shell to a Bunsen burner, I said, what’s with all the turtles, she lowered the flame,  O these really don’t know where they came from one day, and snapped her fingers, such contrast to her otherwise languid demeanor I flinched, there were just turtles

first cellar, reception and box office, second cellar, theater, your quarters, third cellar, my quarters, also my control room, also the boy’s quarters, plastic horses, fourth cellar, wives alive or dead, dull white

last a child, a new child, trapped you in the Pullman

trap door, listen for the ululations, or rather, blowing of the shell. Nothing, nothing, wait, yes, faintly now, nothing, now again faintly, no, now nothing. Can’t hear the wife’s ululations if she’s uluating, your Tonya’s screams if she’s screaming, too distant, too muffled, thus the valet, positioned between second and third floor, blows the turtle shell. At screams or ululations he blows. Nothing, yet faintly now again

tits in profile, feet and hands, onrush of emotion, I’ll translate or transcribe the speech of the wife’s hands and feet. First night back, two hands grip one another, creatures doing battle, then cold mechanical interchange, first attacks, then interchanges, her hands, her feet, half-legible movements of her extremities, they told the tale. Pooled blue Bunsen light, right foot tapping among turtles, left foot stationary, big toe and long calloused second toe twisting, such tapping and twisting, translate, transcribe, we came to the house out of great horror both of us childhoods of unspeakable pain came into this marriage of convenience yes with postures of absolute vanity we had both of us broken through every convention destroyed every prejudice that might have kept us as we were as they imagined we were little children damaged children stared with ravening eyes held our ground as we’d learned we must took possession of the household with unspeakable arrogance  no other weapons damage and arrogance our only weapons one or the other we’d made our choice seized the latter joined forces in this big house this haunted space this Castle Rackrent cue the bats cue the shadows and ghosts cue the howls and rattling chains, all this true, I admitted, and also, what I didn’t say, beside the goddamn

and my wife, don’t you understand the moment passes and it never comes back? The wife demanded new country, new language, new animals, no, I said, without saying

our nocturne, our hand-crank, still lost, I couldn’t

19  bathrooms, 12 fireplaces, 29 crystal chandeliers, four-story skylit art gallery, 280-foot reception hall

instructed the servant, blow the hollow turtle shell at critical moments, your wife screaming in her throes, my wife ululating, the same sound for both, in the stage production the same sound-effect to be employed, blast of the turtle shell for either and for both, never know which of them is screaming, ululating, or if they both are, only know if  they’re both silent at

the wrenching of planks and mortar high above, the crash, I said the crash, of the port couchere falling, you hear and understand nothing, I hear, understand everything. Out the high crescent windows copper beeches

one tape playing, one recording, next night switched, your earpiece, my words

slipping and screeching in muddy leaves, the wife stumbled over herself on three hooves, she tore and tripped on her weirdly bloated and stained skirt, in her stumbles looked like she was burdened with a surfeit of legs. Hours of struggle through the beeches, the sycamore perimeter, at long last tumbled face-down in the mud, path of Melinda Gates. Did Melinda Gates slow down? She took no notice, jogged or danced on, soon vanished, never yet to return, radiating to the last absolute life. Very next day the wife closed her AIDS hospices, went to work on a cure, sent away the AIDS patients, rang security, had them literally kicked to the curb, done forever with AIDS treatment, dedicated now to the cure, goddamn mistake, macro level we work for a cure, micro level, treatment. Even tens, hundreds of millions, wife and I remained always on the micro level, with AIDS. To look for a cure not only futile, destructive. The wife’s dollars, my dollars, they sponsored obscene testing regimens in North Africa

trap door, my parents Indian-style at the edge, looking down, first cellar, second cellar, they observed  the heinous rituals. Third and fourth cellar, dug them this year, you on the mountain, Pullman car, coming to term, a mastiff tunneling, fierce black son of a bitch, windows all white, a Pullman packed in snow, the muzzle hits, I kept digging

rings on the floor, snifter rings where mother, father, slopped cognac, rituals night after night in the second cellar, my parents giddy and without the least shame, peering down

the fire that slices the tongue, faces uplifted, these holy people. I am

wife never failed to write them new checks, Grants 4 The Cure, yellow eyes burning with liver failure, with addiction, a matter of days or weeks word came they too had died, first doing in several score North Africans with their rank quackery

fletcherize the small painted turtle, Chrysemys picta, drink from the larger shell, Chelydra serpentina, you act my part, valet takes yours, me in the third cellar control room, or the wings, pistol cocked. High windows, blue light, or sepia now

Past the beeches, not among them, or rather through them, or just at the perimeter, between the sycamores and beeches, I think, passing from tree to tree, slender trunks like bone, Melinda Gates surpassingly or ideally graceful, gliding, almost dancing as she moved, simplest dance, expressing or opening onto the most profound inner silence, Melinda Gates falling, rising between sycamores, or erased from one tree, present at the next, ponytail, wrists-bands, whole person glinting complexly in the golden

you must see, Kidd paints

eyes, an endless run of eyes

to speak the truth here, this table, tonight, impossible. So the tape, the second cellar, Obies, wine-swilling crowds, the valet’s daughter, so precious, she’ll grow up to serve them, just as my boy, my new boy, will grow up for the news game, echo of an echo, each night new, further degrading at the truth

foul play, my new

up to the second cellar, crack the skull, down to fourth, check the wives, living or dead, third cellar, my boy, my son, each day growing up, plastic horses

always in the wings, always watching. Slightest hitch I reach in vest

and genetic faggotry, my new son perhaps an evolutionary mannequin, evolutionary faggot, no chance of that, but just say, perhaps

nocturne. Hand-crank player, here somewhere, dug for it, excavated crawl spaces, built third cellar, fourth cellar

inoculate him, one night on stage, new son, valet’s role, perfect boy, inoculate, eradicate, then onto news cycle, my boy, my heir.  Years hence, my living son, he joins you on stage. Fifteen, sixteen years old, plays you, one night only, plays you as you now sit, dumb, while you play me, earpiece, cassette tape, jabbering these words, as you will have by then jabbered them for years. The boy will only know you onstage, second cellar, one night only, never in third cellar,  in fourth cellar, where you shall never venture, never in any semblance of real life, never an understanding your biological roll, biological taint, he’ll take on the valet’s part, play you, one night only, just one taste, then vile rituals to inoculate

dawning slowly, over years, first realization, rituals not as the servants had insisted with what seemed, even then, an oddly jocular, ironic tone, shameful secrets that must at all costs be kept from my parents, second realization, parents played their own part, offered a basic sketch, types of activities servants might partake in with the subject, the subject how I imagined myself named during such negotiations, third realization, my parents laid out maneuvers, timing, precise degree of pain, number of candles, tensile strength of silk, angles of hip and bone the subject to be worked through, fourth realization, years later, servants, too, victims of my parents’ perversity, lesser victims, goes without saying

moans, shudders, dull steady creaks, syncopated, falling into easy meter, again syncopated, overtones and disharmonies of all possible description, dull white

both lamps fallen, paintings in shadow, sepia tone long gone, only the chandelier 120 feet above our skulls, the chandelier will not fall, this I can

goddamn chandelier, fragment of Baccarat crystal, a blood spray on Limoge, not fatal, I assure you. So then every night the goddamn chandelier falls. Vast crowds, ovations, perfect Obie trap, each night stellar faggotry, a falling goddamn

splice and continue, crack the skull, search for hand-crank

special staircase, first cellar to third, bypass second cellar altogether, so even on his way up he will never, before that night, have set foot there, second cellar, you forever confined

stamped your tickets, you steamed away, the mountains, the blizzard, fifty feet under, your Tonya strapped stove to her torso, dragged it through the Pullman to do away with the life inside her, she failed, only damaged herself, won’t make it, I fear

black gums, black muzzle, slapping against the Pullman window, through the packed snow parting, hot tar on glass, lips drawn, yellow fangs, black son of a bitch, incisors scratching glass, muzzle sliding, then, new quadrant, small tar blot, the foot pushing off. Muzzle gone, all white, snail-trail of drool

one night on stage, inoculate my new boy, falling chandelier, chandelier effect gone wrong, new boy, new tragedy, fifteen, sixteen years hence, no chance of that

lonely houses, vast fields, poor ignorant folks, no legal know-how, countless deeds, hellish cruelty, hidden wickedness, year in, year out, steaming piss, crack the skull

my boy struck, deep-vein, could never

foul play

and no chance for connection. He doesn’t know you, won’t know you, has never, will never have, seen you before

Second cellar, third cellar, down

The chandelier’s fallen. And there’s too little time

boy’s one day on stage, an accident, or perhaps human agency, perhaps

you, the wife, if alive, the valet, your Tonya, if alive, all suspects, wine-swilling crowds, vipers, cocksuckers, quacks, valet’s daughter, all suspects, the blame

this revolver in my pocket, the misfire

acute and deep-vein thrombosis, my boy

new boy struck, deep-vein, could never

Every day the chandelier effect, every day courting injury, death, that it should fall that day, perhaps human

jealousy, hatred, suicide, in this life so much that is possible, the wonder’s we don’t kill more often than

revenge, grief, dyadic death and neonaticide, valet’s granddaughter born dead, for instance, or killed soon thereafter, and the nocturne, the hand crank, you, your Tonya, all suspects, all vipers and

And say he loves her. My son, the valet’s daughter, a love-match. And if they fled, a chance. But a life of cellars, to free oneself, how can you

Valet’s daughter pregnant, and it’s

A Marley’s chain of motives, sparkling blue and sepia and white light

AIDS charities, art galleries, elementary chattering toys, wind them up, release them, return a year later to

dying son, please not

too late

perhaps a fifth cellar, sixth cellar

oh not again

indebted to Melinda Gates, I

change me

a boy

locked and

§

Mark Edmund Doten’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, Lamination Colony and the Believer. He’s the managing editor of Soho Press.

At last the sisters were traveling together—because sisters should never have to do anything alone but often do for reasons that may include:

1. the swelling of industrial society
2. the splintering of the family unit
3. the annoyances one must go through if one is with one’s sister

Annoyances, such as—and this was the first day of the trip—the sunscreen and the fact that neither of them had any. And the fact that the younger didn’t put any on once they’d gotten some. And that the younger left the bottle open when she did put it on and some spilled on the elder’s dress.

Or, as another example, the fact that the younger couldn’t manage to do anything without the elder’s assistance, so the burden lay on the elder (yes, it was a burden, burden and a gift) to ask for the check, to lift a hand to call for a taximan.

That was the second day.

On the third day they went to Leon and they fought because the elder made a statement that made the younger get up and saunter across the plaza. On the fourth day they went to Granada and it was very pretty but they fought again because the younger made a statement that made the elder put down her fork and refuse to eat. And then the younger said the elder really was so awful and wasn’t it awful to be such an awful person and to have to be with oneself all the time. And then the sisters sat, not speaking, for the rest of the meal. The waiter came around and cleared their plates of barracuda and rice.

The next morning they went to see the waterfall. They hiked on for an hour, never came close to any water of any sort—river, ocean, falls, nothing—lost the trail, doubled back, tried another way, came to a dead end, stopped, and argued among themselves. On the bus back to town (out the window, houses pinned up between clotheslines) the younger made a list of things she was angry at the elder about.

The elder was bossy, first of all.

And mean.

And bossy.

And the elder made her own list.

The younger needed someone to tell her what to do every minute or her head would fall off.

The younger had a mouth on her.

The father loved the younger more, always had. All the elder’s life, he had loved the younger more.

A neat trick, said the younger, considering that for some of the elder’s life the younger didn’t even exist.

They spent the sixth day writing letters at separate tables in the café.

So everything was wrong and going wrong and they still had four more days of sisterly events to get through.

Then the elder said the only course open to them (since of course the elder could see all courses) was to go to the movies, here in this foreign land, because everyone knows the movies are dark and other people talk over a loudspeaker so the sisters wouldn’t be able to see each other or argue, and that is what she decided they should do. So they did. It was an adventure, or a sci-fi feature, or men with guns, done in digits, digitized, with a neatly typed sentence below explaining to everybody in one language as the people on the screen explained, or tried to, in another. The two sisters sat in front of the giant screen. They didn’t argue or see each other but it wasn’t quite the moment of sisterliness the sisters had hoped for.

Afterwards they walked back to the hotel.

Anyone watching them would have unquestionably seen two sisters, walking along, each with a “day pack” on, bought special for this purpose, bags that looked like actual school backpacks, as if this were the walk home from school—an activity they’d never done together, a sister situation denied them (fault of parents: different schools, big city, numbered bus lines) (and perhaps why they couldn’t get along in this present sister condition: they’d had so little practice) (the elder had spent her life alone). No one wanted to interrupt this. Anyone watching could have seen it and of course two men were watching and did want to interrupt it, possibly two brothers themselves, most likely two brothers, and the two brothers took this opportunity to rush up behind the sisters, grab them, hold knives to their throats and say, Dame la mochila.

Now what does that mean?

Give me the bag.

Well.

What happened next is the source of confusion, not for the one sister, the younger, who (head screwed on properly, having benefited from more of her father’s love, and who, being the younger, knew how to take an order) quietly slipped her arms out of her mochila and handed it to the man—no confusion. The confusion came from the other, the elder, who later would say she fought for her bag, that no one was taking her mochila (she hadn’t known that word mochila until that moment and now would know it forever, proudly—her mochila, freshly purchased, now gone), fought for it, she would say. But others in the area (the only other, the sister, since the brothers with knives could not be reached for their comments) would think it didn’t seem like the elder was fighting, exactly. She seemed to be falling or melting or slinking, as if she could slink away from the scene. And the slinking sister has told the story of her fighting back so many times since that she has nearly closed out of her mind any other possibility, so that any other possibility (the truth, say) returns only in sleep or when alone and with less and less frequency so that one day that door will slap shut for good.

She wasn’t fighting. She was running and screaming and falling and an object, a man, was on top of her. Suddenly she heard her sister’s voice, coming over the loudspeaker of her heart, calling to her, finding the words, having the solution. Give them the bag, she said, and the sister on the ground (not alone), bent up her arms as if she’d been waiting all this time, all these years, for the single clear order (Oh, that’s what they want, the bag) that she could never agree to follow.

At work today, Thomas the Dead, as he had privately named himself, made a grave miscalculation by using baby talk with a colleague. He had not previously stooped, even with his own child, to baby talk.  Why give the boy another reason to look at him in that cold, queer way of his?  Nor had Thomas indulged the sweet-toned animal coos that his colleagues babbled at each other when they banked and crashed around the lab on their foolish errands.  Thomas preferred last words, the sort of speech to be discharged on one’s deathbed.  He guessed that some unpleasant number of decades ago as a teenager, when he wore a full beard and sported a tie with his short-sleeved dress shirts, he must have sounded old and tired and bitterly impatient, a youth who had already drawn firm conclusions on the key issues of the day, back when certainty was a young man’s best chance at securing a mate and avoiding a life of hellish solitude, not that this had worked so neatly for him.  Thomas was one for whom speech, the bursting, songlike kind that showed the world what an imbecile you were, was an annoyance that also happened to sour his body like a toxin.

Thomas and the colleague had been refilling their coffees at the same time because he had failed to calibrate his advance on the self-service beverage cart.  Thomas’ mistake, like nearly all of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution.  Death by conversation, and all that.  Avoidable, avoidable, avoidable.  After all, he had seen the colleague approaching, a tumorous, hand-painted mug dangling from her finger.  Thus the peril of a bald, unpoliced encounter with her could not have been more glaringly clear, and the blame was squarely in his corner.  Possibly it was the way the colleague glided shamelessly past Thomas’ desk.  What is it called, he wondered, when you provoke feelings of inferiority and general shittiness in others simply by the way you walk?  When your mode of personal locomotion, in all of its devil-may-care mastery, serves as a scold to everyone fat and leaky and ingloriously failed, sitting in their chairs, tired, swollen, and angry?

The warnings didn’t matter.  The colleague gusted past his desk, flaunting how unmistakably alive she was.  He could smell her superiority and sheer you’ll-never-have-me-ness, the bottled freshness that had shrouded her in a twister of perfume.  Can one copulate against such a column of wind, he wondered?  Are there handholds?  And Thomas, triggered by scent and irritated lust, swallowing a powerful urge to dry heave, sprang after her as if she was riding on a vehicle he suddenly needed to board, despite knowing (or not knowing vividly enough) that he’d only have to wait behind her at the coffee cart and worry the air with his oversized body.

Anyway, Thomas couldn’t fathom how a person who hoped to live through the day could subscribe to such a Lego-ridden fantasy of worker relations the word colleague implied: as if a group of people whose heads were darkened by the very same hovering ass—something he decidedly never learned in night school was the term for how the human voice sounded when the mouth was smothered by an oily slab of buttock—would ever link arms, sing songs, and be massively productive together, just because they peed against the same wall or starched themselves into a stupor on the salted Breadkins from the vending machine every day.  Colleague was a dressed-up word for the coworkers who would feast on his chest if they ever found him unconscious in the bathroom, yet she was his colleague, or coworker, or peer, or well, enemy, just the same, and Thomas couldn’t help thinking of England.  Really he pictured an old, sodden map of England which, even as it molted in his undisciplined imagination, he knew could not be prodded for even the most glancing accuracy (who policed, he wondered, just how badly people imagined things to themselves?).  It wasn’t so very far away, this England, with its bearded men who fought to the death over Plato, who politely disrobed and entered the sexual transaction without a break in their conversational patter, as if it would be the highest rudeness to gasp or cede rhetorical ground at the moment of penetration, even with a half-ready British piece of genitalia that reeked of potatoes.

The colleague walked gaily down the hallway, while Thomas, drafting in her tunnel of outsized merriment, took up the somber rear.  The two of them in procession—like a dashing mom with her slob kid in tow, thought Thomas (a kid who was very noticeably older than his mother)—past the outlying desks and mail bins and various lab doors that were fitted with, instead of door knobs, the long chrome lever arms that one normally saw on walk-in freezers.  Thomas may as well have called after her: Mommy, wait, and he felt a sudden urge to gurgle, fall to the floor, and rub himself for comfort.  Chalk that up to another entirely appropriate response he would never indulge.  If only he had a dead body, or was it money, for all of these, uh, unpursued urges.

They were not exactly friends, Thomas and the colleague, but the two of them coffined up in the same stinking, diesel elevator enough times, trespassing each other’s borders with wartime regularity and altogether too little overt treachery, that didn’t it, he thought, merit some kind of default marriage in the end?  Was there a better working definition of marriage than a weapon-free battle between exhausted and defeated adults, with an agreement to gaze just above each other’s heads, icing each other out with indifference?  Cold War would be the way Ramsey, in equipment, would dismiss it to Thomas, Ramsey who delivered transmissions on married and fathered life whenever Thomas had to sign out gear—a beaker, a tray, and an allergen percolating tool the office referred to as the Bird’s Face—and who frequently just reported the sickeningly early hour he was wrenched awake to monitor his paper-eating, tantrum-spurting kid, a youngster who by 8:30 in the morning was at least four hours deep into his terrible day, exhausted and battle-scarred and as strung out as a torture victim, which, come to think of it, was a pretty adequate description of Ramsey himself.  In fact, whenever Thomas tried to picture Ramsey’s boy, he just pictured another Ramsey, and saw two old, redfaced Ramseys chasing each other around an oatmeal-splattered room.  Big Ramsey and Big Ramsey, trying to kill each other.  A classic story of father and son.

Thomas guessed that at times, maybe in the elevator, the colleague could smell how little he had slept, while in retaliation he could see the sauce stain on her back, or the rumpled tidings of underwear crested over her waist line.  That was a fair piece of intimacy, in the end.  Shouldn’t they, by now, have already trucked past the romantic swells and decadent fits of sharing indulged by the other middle-aged marrieds, toward a brisker season of restraint and theatrical indifference regarding each other’s mild but steady pain?  If they knew each other at all, that is.

For Thomas there was only one outlet for a journey down this hallway—the coffee cart—since he lacked clearance to any of these rooms or freezers or whatever they were.  On bright-lettered signs the doors might have cautioned: Carcass Inside.  Turn Back! But turning back would draw too much notice, and he doubted he could rear up and reverse course without some kind of verbal narrative support of his decision—I’m turning back now because I’m scared!—and the thought of such a strange and conspicuous outburst, even one more finely stated, made him feel vaguely sick.  What kind of idiot does things, then says why?

So off he trotted after her, drugged with regret and adrenaline and the sort of fear that felt like a boring old friend.  He had no mug of his own.  He’d have to work that out later.  And there was an issue with his, uh, pants.  Ahem.  But for now he was up and at-large and he did his best to gather his face and body into an expression of deep purpose, even if there was none he could rightly claim.

The colleague was a long woman, medically attractive, perhaps intensely attractive.  But when Thomas, as was his habit, called up in his mind the nude and indeed the coital prospect with her, simply to work out the mental visualization side of things, in place of vaginal goods, Thomas could only conjure a charcoal sketch of the area, just a shabby pencil drawing of something he was supposed to want to bury his face in and weep with relief into.  This bothered Thomas because although he could not draw, he could imagine all sorts of drawings, an encyclopedic catalog of, uh, especially rich imagery, which turned out to be an entirely useless ability.

It wasn’t the specific armature of nudity that he longed for anyway (the canals and curves and rough red patches bursting with boiling hair), but something dutiful in him—as if his erotic strategy was being assessed by specialists—bowed to an elementary form of sexual speculation, and he customarily launched this material on his inner slide show for their sake.  Perhaps these specialists would see that Thomas could hew to the national erotic standard.  But, if anything, he was fair-minded about his crotch pictures, courteously rendering them from the hips of nearly everyone he passed.  The result was a kind of gallery, the mug shots, he called them, and it calmed him to realize that his central-most imaginative act, the vision work he was called to most consistently and which occupied him more than any other creative task, was to flesh out in his mind the sexual organs of everyone he saw and to catalog this data for later use.  Mostly the genitage that colored his gallery was rendered from some distillation of a person’s face, that is if the face had been squeezed like a sponge or crushed underfoot.  The aesthetics here—what Thomas thought of as his functioning design paradigm, because he had read in one of June’s All About People! folios that we create our private images out of a deep sense of order, logic, beauty, and inevitability whether we like it or not—involved the notion that a dog (or spouse or child or anything we care for and, in particular, feed) comes to look like its provider.  Or something from the stronger, more powerful face is sprayed over the weaker face, rendering it nearly identical.  There was a funny-sounding scientific rule to be invoked here, whatever it was called.  An old biological trick, which makes us think, Thomas guessed, that we are really caring for and feeding ourselves.  One’s crotch-stuff should in some way invoke the face, tell a story about it, Thomas felt, or, rather, one’s face should in its lines and swollen crags map the sexual terroir.  Someone more poetically afflicted could charge up better metaphors about that one.  Or maybe it all just meant that his imagination was severely limited, deriving all of its ideas from the face.  He guessed that artists would laugh at how obviously sourced his material was.  Or maybe they’d just be bored.

Once they arrived for their coffees, Thomas would have to try to drum up some chit chat with the colleague that would not, when it was analyzed for content and style and delivery, by just whoever gave a shit, get him committed to a home, or tossed in a closet that someone somewhere must keep warm for the miserable and lonely and disturbed.  That’s what these people did, wasn’t it?  They spoke in cold chunks of wordage and no one ever wept or seized or died.  The nearly sexual urge Thomas had to destroy himself through difficult encounters, encounters just like these with women who surpassed him in every measurable way, would provide the sweet subject matter for days of mistake analysis, which Thomas found was as rich a pastime as there was.  Now I know what I’m doing this weekend, he thought.  It was as though he’d been programmed to do exactly the wrong thing, and not for the first time he pictured a keypad on his back that anyone could access, a sweaty keypad that he couldn’t very well clean without one of those curved brushes.  This would be another part of his body that itched and hurt and broke and sometimes bled.  Just add it to the list.  Fat Men with Itchy Backs, would be the support group he would join.  Let’s go program Thomas, all the kids might say, and he would quietly lift his shirt so they could have their fun, tucking himself forward so his belly bulged over his legs.  Whose idea was it, this body of his?  Do we need yet more reasons to feel disgusting?  Or if not a keypad, maybe just a kind of embossed symbolage belted over the high rear ribcage—if you can find my ribs, he thought—raised up in scarred topologies like a cattle brand, so pedestrians and god knows who else could effortlessly dispatch him into crisis and shame and encounters of exhaustion simply by coding him, even as he spent nights at home trying to fashion a utensil that would allow him to take control of the area, or just to shield it from poking strangers.

Protection was what Thomas wanted, from people, their words, their bodies, and the storms they kicked up when they came anywhere near him.  Couldn’t the office supply a salt-water receptacle for him to hide away and brine in when there was no actual work on his desk?  A casket—upright, translucent, so the others could see him suspended in saline—to keep him from harm?

It wouldn’t matter.  He’d sniff out the surplus misery anyway, and grind his face in it until the itch stopped, but pretty fat chance of that.

It had been a day of no apparent weather, with grey cars hushing by like silent tracers, and air so swaddled and wet it seemed filled with foam.  Last week at work a streak of birds had been sent forth to pop and burst against the office window.  Thomas figured it to be some pageantry tossed off by the city to stuff the sky with some color, but the official word from the listserv was that a new time-keeping system was being tested.  He hadn’t bothered to calibrate his watch to it, even as, hourly, birds smeared through the air—fired from one of those pipes, or under their own power, Thomas wasn’t sure—struck the office window, and dropped from sight after the impact.  A neat poof, a bright burst of dust, and the bald white clock on the wall clicked off another hour.

No one in the office, as far as he could tell, had even blinked, as if, oh, this kind of slaughter was just a matter of course.  And if Thomas never actually saw a pile of birds rotting in the courtyard, such a pile was inferred, wasn’t it, which was quite enough of a worry to nurse until the office lights were browned down at sunset and the employees were released into the streets, so they could stagger home, hump their wooden comfort dolls, and moan into their blankets all night.  Or whatever Thomas imagined them doing when they weren’t construing allergic thresholds, putting the beaker to a theory, or just tearing into lumpen sandwiches with a single, angry finger.

That was all history now, sucked into some brownish whatever.  There was no one else on their feet now but Thomas and the colleague.  Thomas looked back into the cluster and saw sweaty necks and heads, fat red arms.  It was error sampling time, at least in his unit, and it was nervous, spastic work.  So much lab work resembled one’s early attempts at masturbation.  There were angry little bursts of typing, and the group of employees seemed to wheeze as a single beast with one faulty lung.  He was careful to silence himself while he walked after the colleague, to guard his breath and keep his pants legs from shooshing.  But just because no one was looking at him didn’t mean his pursuit was going, uh, unnoticed.  Thomas kept his head steady, but stole his eyes toward the greasy camera, a lens jammed badly into some mottled sheetrock, behind which Solly in the security room would be fastidiously ignoring them.  Thomas guessed that Solly’s pants would be shucked and he’d be wrapping a slice of soft white bread around his penis while the security monitors revealed in blue light all the morons who walked and slept and stood and self-groomed around Crawford Labs.

This was the easy part.  A straightaway down the lab’s pale hallway that would allow him to get himself together.  Big goddamn ha, ha to that.  He pulled down his shirt as he walked.  He got his thumbs between his belt and pants, deep into his bready sides, but this did little.  You can’t very well hang onto yourself! The wise old maxim of someone important who was now rotting in a hole, a phrase lost to needlepoint and coffee mugs.  He licked a finger on each hand and worked some dried out spit over his eyebrows.  Such pointless grooming.  If only he could shed a limb, or just reach inside his face and reshape it so he looked, maybe, just a small bit less Thomas-y.  Let’s do a little work on that face, how about? As it was, his face looked as though someone had tried to reshape it, and failed.

The colleague in her cloud of superiority had done her prep in private, no doubt.  She was born prepped, Thomas thought, and he pictured her in adult form being birthed in a clean bright room somewhere to a team of scientists, who wiped her off, hosed her down, and fitted her in specialized gear so she could go out and make other people feel bad.  She actually, probably, looked forward to such workplace soujorns like this, so she could flaunt her shit here and there and take everyone down a notch.

But was there a lower notch, Thomas wondered?  Let’s invent a new notch, underground, and let’s get you all nice and cozy there. He’d find out pretty soon, at the beverage cart, where the basic transaction of drink retrieval, the animal quest for hot, black fluid that Thomas rigorously pursued alone so as not to ever, and that would mean never, have to enter a discussion, would be precisely too long to undertake without some kind of conversational exchange.

The problem was that the beverage cart was lodged all alone in an arena-sized space referred to by the laboratory staff—by pretty much anyone who worked and drank and ate and felt pain at Crawford Labs—as the Moors.  The Moors was so misconceived architecturally that none of the so-called founders of Crawford could do anything except stash the coffee cart in it, stain it with some Germanic decorations that seemed spritzed from a hose—a hose with different, ethnic tips—and hope not to die.  Somewhere there were architects rubbing their hands together, laughing at the idiots who were daily demoralized in the spaces they designed.  Demoralized, crushed, belittled, and then, just for fun, de-sexed in the most complete possible way.  Genitals flicked off neatly at the base.  Holes smoothed over with one of those Photoshop tools.  Bottoms filled in with putty.

The Moors may just as well have had a genital removal station you visited on your way out, water fountain height, retractable into the wall.  Tilt in your hips and come back clean.  And the egghead architects laughing and pointing, maybe even rubbing themselves into states of ecstasy.  Their brains probably sat outside of their heads, simmering in jars of cola.  It was a pornographic pleasure, no doubt, to watch people killed in buildings, killed slowly, brought just near death and held in suspension simply by pre-calculated dimensions, by room design.  Someone had already thought of this, he knew, the killing power of buildings, so, who cares, another great idea he could not claim as his own.  Buildings were coffins, of course, but that came later.  First they were killing machines.  Did it matter to anyone how mixed that metaphor was, and where had he read that, anyway?  It was probably one of those folios that had been ribboned together as a wedding present for him and June, someone’s younger brother’s dissertation.  Best wishes, here’s my fat brother’s piece of obscure scholarship.  We love you guys! He didn’t remember ticking that off on the registry at the fucking Shoe Hole, or wherever he and Juney had listed the material bill of goods that would transform their ordinary marriage into a super-powered alliance, or whatever.

No doubt there were cool loaves of data on a server somewhere devoted to the subject of architectural annihilation, and the theory was clearly infallible, Thomas thought, lumbering after the colleague, who was bouncing out of sight at the end of the hallway.  Yet anyone who likened a building to a coffin, anyone who went public with what every known human in the world already totally accepted to be true, was officially considered an asshole.

Of course the Moors must have been built to enable the kind of productivity that architects fantasize about while at work in their hoteliers—whatever those studios were called—where their young assistants, wearing t-shirts and no pants, rendered drawings, bound by contract, by the apprentice’s promise, to relieve all impediments to their masters’ creativity.  The Moors was probably meant to be a place where people will be thinking and performing at their best, why not, a blueprint premised on the belief that the actual people who would seize this space for their displays of high performance creativity would not be defeated, exhausted, unattractive, and sad.  Excepting our friend the colleague, of course.  Immune to space.  Sadproofed.  The Moors was designed for people who just couldn’t be bothered to die on time.  Architects don’t make buildings for people who are a bloody mess, just soup, really, because then there’d be no buildings, just tureens.  Had there been a dissertation on that?  Whose fat brother wanted to take that one on, wondered Thomas?  Tenure fucking awaits.  Vats would be trucked in from the factories and the people would be poured in.  Architects have somehow gotten away with thinking that people are not already technically dead, dead beyond repair, according to the accepted measurements, while really they are sloshing inside their clothing, walking spills.  It is their first mistake, Thomas thought: believing they are not building coffins.  Why weren’t architects simply called coffin makers?

The complete story is available in Tin House #42.

The effigy was always burned rather gaily apparently. The band would play in the road. The ribbons and the banners, I suppose, would hang from the posts. There are, in passages in Saint Thomas, his hair and the bier, for instance—thus the pomp, thus the haw. In Saint Matthew—daffodils, the dot on the body, the question of the widow, a quaint explanation of the cloaks. In Saint Philip—a procession in Galilee, which is apropos, is it not?—though a bit curious, too, actually, given how, according to Saint Peter at least, the bones were arranged to form a cross. I hate to think of grave things—though it occurs to me that I have already confused various of the phrases, that I have perhaps mistaken one verse for another, that there is a moment at the conclusion of a sermon wherein an array of serpents appears in a potter’s field, the location of the sun invoked for this reason or that, and he is buried.

Observe then, reader—we are safe here. Do you see? The Pharisees were whipped and stoned—while, for instance, women called to the goats. The day, of course, ended, which is pretty safe for us—save the image, it seems to me, of the open gate—save the fact, obviously, of the leeches upon the priests’ feet. It gives me a fright—though the pommée and the bleat are, after all, so dire, are they not? The ridge apparent in the wood somehow reminds me, however, of that Dürer painting—the grand red stripe at the edge, the unfortunate boys, the tiny hat for naught. But please forgive me; I will try to make this quite clear. He was shaking so. He hid (as such). He spoke (possibly). The Gospels indicate he dropped the silver coins in the temple, that he hanged himself in Qumran. Or, on the other hand, no—indeed, certainly not, as he actually rode in an animal cart through a pass, as he actually fell in a field in Emmaus.

Thus—Maundy Thursday.

Thus—Good Friday.

The effigy was always marked, first of all, about the neck—mud, probably, or soot, albeit only a smudge, really, as per a certain parable—which is an oddly charming point, I think. But are we to believe such things, finally? That Saint Francis’s alb was boiled in a stew at a priory in Portugal? That a Sadducee’s bowl contains a lock (as they say) of the hair? That the straw represents the purse? That the powder represents the ashes? Behold, in other words, the body. There is an engraving (fourteenth-century, if I remember correctly—English, maybe) that displays a figure in, if you will, his eternal torment—and so a neat column of flames and a loop of beehives, for instance, are introduced in the foreground. There is one with horses, too, in the corner, in the bramble, in gallop, manes to and fro, it would seem, the horses facing one another, or, again, no—one is looking away. I love the olive trees (there is a sort of stateliness, is there not?)—beneath which, moreover, are lines of arrows and ovals that, arranged thus, indicate, why, not very much at all—as far as I can see, anyway. The inscription mentions how he was brought to the tomb—days in the wilderness, to begin with; the row of camels in the road; the hair cut off, the thumbs cut off, the tongue cut out.

There is a Spanish word for his footsteps.

The monks would walk in the morning, you know. The effigy was always marked elsewhere, also, on Holy Saturday, unless I have not understood the story properly—the wrists and the ankles, naturally; the reddish streak about the lips, of course. There are older stories—the sexton stood in the belfry; the cassock was drawn to the hip; the church cat was fixed; the puppet was cinched and then dipped in tar (by the vicar). How it wounds me, this notion—though I wonder if they were saved, on the other hand, something concerning Mary’s hair in May and the women walking with baskets of market—hew, imagine, crocks, a home—so merry, so merry. But in fact—the goats were all gone, higgledy-piggledy, down the hill, far away; and he appears, actually, in none of the drawings, anyway, except the one in Saint Bartholomew’s book—gargoyles for the birthday, and blots, only, for the wife on Saint Agnes’s Eve—the skulls and the like, even the smoke next to the lists of the names—whereas she died, as you know, oh, somewhat less well.

But to continue. I have never known quite why the bits of wax were placed here and there, near the altar, in the pew, for the Mass—and, either way, indeed, how does this explain the lovely ivy on the walls of the abbey? Saint Bathildes ate cabbage for lunch every day—with the prelate, who was ill. Saint Jerome sat in his cell—the engraving shows this (and, too, candlesticks and a statue of Saint Christopher). Saint Anthony looked away—this is in one or another of the lives. A cross was there by chance, just the hasps, or a shadow, a wisp of something on his hand, they say, the moment before his death—though they are uncertain on the subject of the sunlight—though they are uncertain as to the figure of the attendant, about whom they include a pun, as it happens. The body was perfumed and costumed, and the face was hidden—though maybe this is melancholy to consider.

In any event.

I like to think of the ceremony—hoods, filigree, the folds in the drapery, you see, the breeze in the trees in the arbor. Well, this sort of moment, yes—but I am wrong, of course. A cat was once thrown from the tower on East Sunday—and Saint Babylas refers to buzzards and to a spot of dirt in Spain. The effigy was always brought to the church steps at noon, certainly. I have always imagined a great billowing of the cloak in the wind—though this is probably silly of me, is it not? The ministrant would ring the bells. The band would march back and forth in the road. The ladder, I take it, would creak.

Reprinted, with the permission of the author, from A GERMAN PICTURESQUE, Alfred A. Knopf 1998.

Jason Schwartz is the author of a book of fiction, A German Picturesque (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant, The Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Unsaid, and other publications. He directs the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University.