42.
Stet watched the drugs steaming in the rust-stained sink, and tried to shake the idea that God wanted him to call the cops on himself. He had no desire to be arrested, to be read his rights and forced to wait, handcuffed, while the bomb squad dismantled the double-wide. To go to jail, a thin white boy tossed in with bitter weight-lifting minorities. But he could see himself doing it all the same: Stet walking back toward the trailer, not even bothering to close the shed door behind him, let alone lock it, because what’s the point? He’d pick his cell phone up off the coffee table and push the nine key. Stet wondered if getting arrested was the type of event you ought to wear a shirt to, and laughed. The fumes were getting to his brain probably. He switched on the exhaust fan on his way out of the shed and closed the door behind him, double-checking the padlock just to make sure.
Bricks, most of them broken, lined the short path back to his house. He turned back toward the shed for a minute to watch the steam pouring, translucent and oily, through the roof’s stovepipe up into the sky.
When he swung open the screen door, Stet caught the dog crouching on top of the laundry pile — clean clothes Stet hadn’t put away yet — pissing. It looked up at him, its eyes dull and bovine, too dumb to flinch in fright. Light-beer-colored urine, hot and salty smelling, soaked into the underwear and balled-up socks, Star’s flannel pajama pants. Stet cursed and kicked. His bare foot caught the dog under the chin, and Stet stubbed a toe on its hairy jawbone. The dog, still pissing, fell backward into the refrigerator. Stet grabbed its collar and dragged the whimpering little shit, claws skittering the whole way, across the linoleum. He kicked open the door and threw the dog out into the grass.
“We make nono in the yard, cocksucker,” he growled. He followed the dog outside and began to look for a large stick or a loose board, but he ended up punching himself in the thigh instead, hard enough to leave a bruise. The idiot had probably already forgotten what it did. Stet unlocked the shed.
He came back outside holding up a chunk of the new drug – a hardened reduction of extra-strength cough syrup and off-brand silverware polishing fluid – still hot enough to feel uncomfortable in his hand. The dog hunched its back and clamped its trembling tail between its hind legs when Stet came near, but it knew better than to run away. Stet pried open its mouth and shoved the drug inside. He clamped his hand over its snout until he saw its Adam’s apple bob. The dog snorted snot and whimpered once, short and sharp, but it did not throw up. Eventually, it lied back down in the long-dead grass, and Stet went inside to watch TV.
The laundry reeked and would have to be rewashed before Star’s shift ended, but lunch would come first. They were out of beer and Kahlua, so Stet laced some powder-based chocolate milk with vodka from a plastic bottle. He turned on the television and sat down on the couch. He’d come in on the middle of one of Star's shows. A female chef was making a cake for her ex's birthday party, her tears dripping into the butterscotch frosting she mixed. She removed the paper hat from her head and blew her nose into it. Stet checked the couch cushions for the remote control then wandered back outside.
The dog was asleep but visibly breathing, so Stet went into the shed and broke off a chunk for himself.
Back inside, Stet stepped over a yellowed white T-shirt and opened the refrigerator door. A nearly empty bottle of soy sauce stood alone on the top shelf, stuck solid in what appeared to be a pool of congealed cola, and he knew better than to open the carton of cottage cheese that sat inside the door. The carrots in the crisper were several inches shorter than they’d been when he’d bought them, and flecked with a fine white film. Stet added more vodka to his milk and lied back down on the couch. The hunk of drug was gritty and insoluble; it hung in his throat like a rock in a python, and he finished off the whole glass of milk — an oversized gas-station-soda-fountain cup — getting it down. Once it hit his stomach though, he could feel it dissolving. It took root in his gut and branched out into his bloodstream, flowering once it reached his brain, petals pushing against his skull. A reptile clawing through its eggshell.
6.
Stet sat on his father’s unmade bed, balancing a plate of food he couldn’t eat in his lap: either a breast or thigh from supermarket fried chicken, and a slice of green gelatin mold embedded with slivers of what he’d first assumed was coconut but later determined was carrots. All he could think, all he’d been thinking for the past three days was that this was what it was like. This is how it felt for his father to be dead. He looked at the room around him. A paperback book lay face down on the nightstand, propped open at about the halfway point. He’d never finish reading it now. But that wasn’t really true, was it, considering this was the only book Stet had ever known of his father owning, and it predated Stet by years. The glass of water next to book would remain mostly undrunk, but it was hard to get sentimental about. The bed would never be made again, and with the weird certainty of a memory, Stet could picture himself stripping the sheets from the mattress, leaving it and the box-spring, unclaimed, leaning against the dumpster out back.
His father’s wedding ring, a thin band of anemic yellow gold, sat wedged in the crack between the bed and nightstand.
Your mother’s going to sell it, a voice that was his but somehow not warned, and not even from spite. She just won’t care, and he didn’t leave a will, so it’s all going to an estate buyer. Pocket it now, and she’ll never know.
He reached down for the ring, let it sit in his open palm, feeling or telling himself he felt its sleight weight in his hand. He put his hand inside his sportscoat and dropped the ring in his dress-shirt pocket. It felt reassuring pressing against his left nipple.
But it had to mean something to her that he still kept the ring all these years later, he thought. Had his father continued to wear it, only removing it before bed or had he just got it out once and misplaced it? Stet removed the ring from his breast pocket and slipped it on each of his fingers, one by one, until he’d determined the ring came closest to fitting on his right hand thumb. He pulled the ring off his thumb and left it sitting on the table next to the book and water glass where his mother would have to discover it. He carried his plate into the kitchen and ran everything, chicken bones and all, through the garbage disposal. Somewhere else, he became aware of a key slipping into a lock.
23.
Star opened the front door. “Are you napping?” she asked first thing, already disappointed by the answer. Stet sat up to quick, grabbed his forehead. He’d held the ring in his hand, felt it encircling his finger even, but his thumb was naked now, and he wasn’t even wearing a shirt.
Star unbuttoned her knee-length black peacoat — its once-fuzzy finish worn second-hand shiny. A smell like high-school-football two-a-days filled the room. It was probably 90 degrees outside, and the club’s central air had been down all week. Star caught him crinkling his nose and flung her coat at him. He caught it, pretending to take this as playful, and draped it over the back of the couch.
“That cheap-ass Gino needs to build you guys a locker room so you can change clothes at work.”
“My lazy-ass boyfriend needs to get his piece of shit drug on the market so I can stop riding the bus in a G-string.” She was wearing a teddy covered in glittery blue fishscale sequins, which she slipped down over her plastic high heels and stepped out of. Stet mimicked a sexy guitar riff and wound up with a facefull of damp teddy.
She slammed a handful of wet change and torn singles (Stet was pretty sure he spotted a fifty-cent piece in there) down on the coffee table on her way to the kitchen. “You know what the lunch shift is like. No tips, no lap dances. It’s hard to eat a ten-dollar ribeye with tits in your face.” She squeezed herself for emphasis and disappeared through the doorway.
Stet panicked and ran in after her. “I know,” he hollered too quick. “That’s why I been testing the new batch all afternoon. I just got to get you out of —“
He came into the room in time to watch her pulling up her flannel pants — multicolored stars on a field of black-faded-gray. She’d taken that oversized white T-shirt from the top of the pile, and it appeared unstained.
“I wish you would’ve put these away like I asked, “ she said, but didn’t seem too upset.
The laundry pile, completely dry ,smelt like fabric softener. The dog lay outside in the shade of the shed sleeping off the effects of the drug it’d been forced to ingest. Stet couldn’t at this point remember why he’d been worried, and thought only of the wedding ring’s just-perceptible weigh in his palm.
38.
Hitting the lottery, it turned out, took a couple of tries. The key, Stet soon realized, was not trying to remember back to a time before he'd taken the drug and realized what it could do. He failed at first, recalling a time about six months previous when the jackpot reached an all-time high.
But if it's at it's all-time high this week, six-months-ago Stet wondered to himself while trying to decipher the shapeless, omnicolored forms that made up the scrambled fifty-dollar wrestling championship on his TV, that means somebody is/was going to win it anyway. Otherwise, it'd just be higher next week. Wouldn't it have been better to win it last week when he wouldn't have to split the prize money?
He leaned back on the couch and nodded to himself, satisfied he'd warded off a nasty flashback of some drug or other with indisputable logic.
Star slammed the bathroom door behind her as she stepped out into the hallway. She stopped between the TV and Stet, swollen-eyed and wet-nosed.
"It's done with now," she said, "I bet you're happy to know."
He resisted the impulse to sigh. "It isn't like we weren't going to the clinic next week anyhow."
She pushed her hands down the front of her T-shirt as though she'd had no towel in the bathroom. Stet followed the gesture to the dime-sized spotting on the front of her underwear. Star caught his gaze and stomped back to the bathroom to flush the toilet.
His first thought was to yell, but he stopped himself, somehow sure that this would not cause a back up in the septic tank.
So he'd have to wait for the current jackpot to grow to a worthwhile amount and keep his mind open to number suggestions. The problem now was he couldn't quit thinking of numbers. By the day of the next drawing, he'd filled several pages with lottery numbers, all guaranteed to hit. Seriously, this time it's me, from the future – listen to me! – you have to buy a ticket with the following numbers.
The cost of the tickets he'd need to buy was more than the money set aside for the vinyl-siding payment and the cable bill combined, more than the money he got for returning that prepaid-cellphone-minute card to the store, more than he got for pawning the TV set, but not more than Star could earn at the club when she had to. Mostly none of that mattered, though, when one of the tickets, numbers culled from deep into the third page, hit.
After they'd moved to the island, after they'd won that state's jackpot, too, and all the gas station clerks on the island had Stet's driver's license info memorized, Star asked, "Isn't there something better you could be doing with this power you got? Something less selfish, like preventing tragedies or making the world a safer place maybe?"
Stet finished transcribing the number and closed his notebook. "I see where you're going with this, babe," he said. "Trouble is I'm stuck in my own head here, and my memories are too insignificant to do anyone else any good. Nobody invited me to Hitler's baby shower, you know?"
A yellow school bus rolled along the dirt road behind their house at a certain time every afternoon. The children riding it, Stet was pretty confident, were too far away to make out the joint he smoked on the back porch while he waited to wave at them.
Star came out and he offered her a drag, but she flinched like he'd tried to jam a severed finger in her mouth.
"Promise me," she said, turning to keep her back to the approaching school bus.
"Promise me that you will never, no matter what, let me take any of that drug."
Stet looked down at the joint.
"Not that," she said immediately. "The drug. I have to know that I will never take it in the future. I need to know that for a fact."
"I promise," Stet said, but the next afternoon, he caught her stretching lengths of razor wire fence across the dirt road. She hunched down close to the ground, carefully placing each wire perpendicular to the last. In her left hand she gripped the shotgun so tight her forearm veins plumped to thick blue cables. She pointed the gun at Stet when she heard him approach. The tip of the barrel was stained red, the same shade as her lipstick.
"I have to do it," she said, her words coming in sopping wet gasps, "to save the future."
He slapped the gun to the ground and drug her back inside the house.
Inside, he thrust a pie plate full of the drug at her face.
"Here," he said. "Take it. You need to know how it really is."
She threw herself on the bed then, and refused to take the pillow from her face.
Stet left the pan lying on the end of the bed next to her booted feet and closed the door on his way out.
In the morning, Star and every trace of her were gone, and though Stet felt funny living by himself, he couldn't remember ever having shared the house with anyone.
17.
"We got a threepeater here, Jenny." Olson brandished the report like negative test results from the free-clinic.
Jennings did not respond.
"A three-time lottery winner?" Olson sat the report on Jennings' desk with a deliberate noise. Jennings picked it up, but knew he wouldn't have to read it.
"Sounds like a case for the IRS."
"No, that's a repeat win." Olson snatched the report back from Jennings' hand. "The odds against hitting all the numbers in a state lottery the first time are ridiculous, billions to one. The second time? That's just impossible. The only explanation is a cheat."
"And a dumb one."
"True. That's when the auditors investigate the winner, figure out his scam. But a third win? That's our jurisdiction. After you've eliminated any wrongdoing, the most likely explanation —" he handed the report back to Jennings. "Read it for yourself. Bottom of the second page."
Jennings turned the page and read: "... indicates either an ability to foresee future events or access to a time-travel device."
Stet sat on the sofa watching a 120-inch high-resolution TV set tuned to static, with the volume muted. He had taken to reciting the numbers in his head out loud, since there was no reason to continue writing them down. He'd had to build a second garage to store his jet-skis.
The doorbell rang, interrupting Stet halfway through his ticket. After he sat for a moment remembering what that noise signified, Stet got up and walked to the peephole.
On the opposite side of the door stood a black man, tall and thin, wearing cream-colored slacks and an oversized pastel palm-tree shirt that looked like it was purchased at the airport gift shop. The shirt hung at awkward, boxy angles as though concealing body armor, and the man held a leather ID case opened and presented to the peephole for Stet's inspection — either an official government license or one made convincingly enough to look like one. He held the other hand behind his back as though keeping his balance as he leaned slightly forward.
Stet opened the door. Jennings pushed inside and took his hand from behind him, revealing the electroshock gun he was holding. He pulled the trigger and the pointed cartridge latched itself on the scrawny white shit's bare pectoral muscle. He was the kind with thin arms and a round beer-bloated gut, and he fell to the carpet, convulsing like a suffocating monkey.
"So you're no psychic," Jennings hollered over Stet's involuntary whimpers. "How about you show me to your time machine?"
Too late, Jennings noticed Stet held something in his clenched hand. Jennings dropped the gun and dove to the ground, but that gave Stet enough time to put his hand to his mouth and swallow. He closed his eyes and quit moving, and Jennings could not slap him awake. Some kind of time-traveler's suicide pill, Jennings figured.
The instant Jennings mashed the doorbell with his thumb, the door flew open. Behind it stood Stet, holding a 40mm single-shot riot gun loaded with a high-impact baton round. Stet pulled the trigger. The baton hit Jennings midchest, making a dull pop against his bullet-proof vest, followed immediately by the unmistakable cracking of ribs. Jennings reached to grab Stet's shirt, but by that time Jennings had been thrown several feet back from where he thought he was. He landed on his back in the bushes lining the porch.
Stet ran past him toward the toolshed at the end of the driveway.
Jennings, a few minutes later, came staggering after him. Inside the shed, he found stacks of empty pie plates, and a not-quite-closed panel in the wooden floor. He awkwardly pushed it open with the toe of his shoe, revealing a thick steel door.
Jennings reached slowly, so slowly, into his pocket for the small brick of C-4.
Inside, Stet could hear the agent somehow tampering with the door, and he realized this was no way to deal with this situation. He popped another chunk of the drug into his mouth and began to chew, twisting his face at the alkali flavor. He should’ve kept something to drink down here. He swallowed just as the door exploded from hits hinges and dropped to the ground beneath it, shaking the room and raising clouds of smoke and dust.
Jennings followed soon after, screaming but sticking the landing.
Stet pointed the empty riot gun at the shape and closed his eyes. Jennings stepped through the smoke and shot Stet through the forehead with his government-issued handgun.
Jennings stepped through the smoke holding the pistol in front of him. He found the man, Stetson, holding his arms extended above his head.
"You win, OK?" he said quickly, almost startling Jennings bad enough to make him squeeze the trigger. "Just don't--"
One of the man's hands was closed into a fist, concealing something. Jennings shot him in the kneecap.
Stetson folded over on himself and fell face first to the floor, letting go of the object he'd been holding — a crusty brown piece of something, a little like a dirt clod. It crumbled against the imitation tile.
"Just take it, man," Stet shrieked. He'd rolled over now and held his bloody knee in a yoga pose. "Take it, and don't shoot me next time."
35.
Stet woke strapped tight to an adjustable hospital bed in a windowless gray room. An IV needle protruded from his right forearm, connected by tubes to two transparent bags: one a standard saline-drip setup, and the other filled with a murky brown liquid Stet was sickly certain he could identify. The top of his head was painfully cold and it itched. A throat cleared, and Stet realized for the first time that an older man, jowled and balding, sat in a chair at the foot of the bed.
"Please, take the drug," Stet said. "Take all of it. Do whatever you want to with it."
The man forced a laugh. "You can't imagine the damage your drug has done to my department."
Stet looked down at his knee. The bullet wound had been bandaged but not professionally, and it hurt in a way he was afraid to consider too carefully. The old man waited to reestablish eye contact and continued.
"None of my agents took it, you understand. But almost everyone who knew of its existence has ended up on medical leave. It had my people evacuating government buildings for bomb scares they'd only imagined, placing panicked phone calls to senators and the president — the president — warning of nonexistant assassination attempts, everyone of them convinced they would take the drug at some future date to prevent past catastrophe. Your friend Jennings? I found him sitting at his desk naked, rubbing his own feces into his hair. Do you know what he said to me?"
Stet didn't.
The man broke eye contact. "And there've been other ... poisoned thoughts as well. What we need is for this drug of yours to never have existed. You're going to travel via this drug back to when you created it and convince yourself to throw it out, or report yourself to the police or something."
"That won’t —"
"Nurse?"
A male nurse — or, more realistically, a large tattooed man, perhaps a special forces operative, dressed in a nurse's scrubs — stepped out from somewhere behind Stet's head.
"Get him started, please," the old man said, and the nurse began fiddling with a valve connected to the brown-filled bag.
The doorbell rang, and Stet reached for the 40mm. He considered, then loaded a live round into the —
Stet flung himself forward against the straps, puking tar into the bucket the nurse held beneath his chin.
"Nice try," the old man said. "We've got electrodes hooked to your brain, ready to trigger nausea anytime you start to access a recent memory. Again, nurse, if you please."
He refused to call the cops. He managed to convince himself to put the ring back, but he still suspected what the drug could do. This time he wouldn't bother with the gun at all, he would just go running out the back —"
And then he was vomiting again.
"Nurse increase the dosage," the old man said. "Don't let up this time. Do it right and this will all go away, won't it?"
He kicked the dog, but he didn't have a dog. He tripped running and bumped his chin on the end table. He ate popsicles till he couldn't feel the bruise even though he knew they'd give him a tummy ache. He dropped Valentines into almost everyone's box, but the teacher caught him skipping over Flabigail Jenkins and punched his good-citizen slip. He drove a girl home in her car, apologizing the whole way while she wiped her tongue on her sweatshirt sleeve.
His father removed the oversized hat he claimed their name demanded, and sat it carefully down next to his sleeping bag. The boy zipped the tent flap shut as hard as he could.
"I'm supposed to be sharing a tent with another kid my age," the boy demanded. "Why am I the only boy here who has to share a tent with his father?"
His father reached into the duffle bag and removed a flattened vinyl rectangle. "I bet you thought I forgot our pillows, didn't you?" He put a valve to his lips and blew, expanding a corner of the rectangle, then removed it from his face. "It's inflatable."
"It's not fair. I hate it."
But later in the dark: "Dad?" It was the first time hadn't said "Daddy."
"Yes?"
"I love you." He spoke slow and careful. He didn't want his voice to shake. "I love you — and I'm glad I get to share the tent with you."
"I love you too, son. Now get some sleep. Tomorrow, we're going canoeing."
Monday, October 26, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Animal Cruelty
You find the hurt brown bird in the backyard. It looks up at you from the sharp dry summer grass. Its eye is shiny and black and it doesn’t stay still. Out by the fence where you found the giant diamond that was really just a piece of glass. You can still see the hole it left in the dirt. There almost underneath the bird’s folded wing. The other wing is open and flapping. The top of it hangs down to make a triangle. You thought before about how you could catch one. When you saw a bird pecking at the ground you wanted to sneak upon it so quiet and slow it couldn’t hear you and trap it under your sand bucket. But it couldn’t live in a bucket. It wouldn’t stay there. Not even if you filled up the bottom with grass and dug up worms every day. You reach for the bird and touch it with your fingers. The feathers feel like baby hair. You pick it up and it squeaks. You close your fist around its middle and push its folded wing into your hand. The broken wing brushes your face. Your arm shakes. You run to the hard round table and drop the bird on it. The hurt brown bird stands up on the table and walks in a small circle. The table is made of concrete with big hunks of different colored rocks in it. Birds are dirty and you know you shouldn’t touch them. An animal doctor -- a veterinarian -- would examine the bird on a table like how you are now but then he would put a cast on the wing. Casts are made from something like concrete but not as heavy or you couldn’t move your arm.
The bird couldn’t fly in a cast. It would need time to get better and animals can’t go inside the hospital. The bird is lying down again. Its chest gets bigger when it breathes. You spread its wings out, long feathers joined by thin elastic skin like a Chinese fan. The bone ends scrape together, and you let go.
Maybe the bird just needs help to take off. If you help it get up into the air it can fly back home to its nest. You carry back over to by the fence where you found it. The bird’s claws try to make a fist around your thumb. You throw it high up over the fence but it doesn’t even try to fly. It plummets and makes a plop on the other side, but it doesn’t bounce.
Before it’s time to go inside you look through the crack at the bottom of the gate to see if the bird is still there. It lies on its broken wing in the alley dirt looking up into the sun. Ants march in lines from their dark hill to the hurt brown bird and back again. The ants are the black and red kind that bite and they crawl in between its feathers. Their antennas feel its skin for a good place for their tiny teeth to tear off little hunks of bird meat that the ants will take back to their hill to feed their queen. The bird’s wing makes an worthless flap every time its heart beats.
Ants are crawling in its eye.
The stainless steel box, measuring approximately 23.5 cm (9 in.) x 17.8 cm (7 in.) x 14 cm (5.5 in.) sits, as per its included instruction pamphlet, lengthwise parallel to an interior garage wall beneath a dust-furred queen-sized headboard made from knotty pine. A less than average-sized member of the species mus musculus (common gray-brown house mouse), scouring the vinyl baseboards in paranoid fits, approaches the box cautiously, roseate nostrils aquiver. The mouse moves to circumvent the box, but halts at the corner, sensing the void ahead. Cutting sharp the corner, the rodent feels cold metal brush against its fine hackled hairs. Its whiskers sense an opening just above its head. The mouse tips back onto its haunches to hook its front feet over the hole’s bottom lip and pulls itself inside. The hole leads to a cylindrical tunnel of molded black plastic. The springed pressure plate clicks, triggered by the mouse’s 14 g (.5 oz.) mass, and the cylander spins, tumbling the mouse through a rectangular opening onto its back. Once the tunnel’s completed its rotation, the compartment is sealed. The mouse shrieks and scurries through the open air until it’s righted. The Other lies in a corner, emitting a distressed odor, but hardly moving save it’s shakily pulsating heartbeat, which sends infinitesimal tremors across the compartment floor. It’s not resting in close proximity to a food source, so the mouse moves on to the other corners, quickly determining them barren. The mouse pushes off its back legs, scraping its nails against the slick, unyielding surface. The Other’s palpitations slow then altogether cease. The mouse sniffs at its emaciated carcass. Trembling, the mouse presses its snout beneath the Other’s fur and begins nibbling at its flakey, sour skin. The fat-encased intestines, once bitten into, expel a sugary, decadent gas, causing the mouse to look away..
Above, the cylinder again clicks and tumbles, depositing a new other on the cold metal floor. The Other silently regains its footing and scurries straight toward the corpse. The mouse bares its blood-blackened teeth, and the Other hesitates. The mouse returns its attention to the corpse’s tender spoiled interior, grinding hunks of colon, damp and gritty, between its teeth. The Other takes a position just out of reach and begins chewing at the tip of the corpse’s limp, scaly tail.
When the skeleton’s bones have been gnawed marrowless, the mouse again explores the vacant corners again, pushing itself up against the walls, as though it’s discovered another opening, this one just out of reach. It tips weakly back, and the other is at its throat, tearing at its windpipe. The mouse twists and convulses underneath, shrieking and clawing at the Other’s eyes. A claw lacerates a cornea, and the mouse pushes its toes into the hot ooze.
While the mouse slurps at the gelatinous goop, the Other squeaks and pantomimes a scurry, its paws unable to gain purchase on the cold steel.
Sniffing at the wall, the mouse feels a whisker poke through into the open outside air. It presses its nose to a hole just large enough to encircle it The mouse soon finds another of identical size, then another. This is a perforated window designed to permit viewing of the status of the trap’s takings without first sliding open the thin steel door. The cylinder overhead clicks again, and a new Other lands, snapping brittle bones beneath it. Paper thin skin crackles like dried papyrus. The mouse rushes to meet it.
The ant, not named, skitters noiselessly across a heavily enameled particle-board countertop. A mass once edible but now hardened beyond breaking impedes its intended path and must be circumvented. The room’s brightness, a potential danger is registered then all but disregarded.
The ant inhales, still unable to determine the exact location of the potential food source. The scent, too faint to pinpoint, is sweet but faintly astringent, a combination closer to citrus than rotting flesh. The ant turns back toward that inedible coagulation and begins to jab at it with frantic antennae, confirming its complete impenetrability before it moves on. A much larger presence looms just beyond perceptibility, but the ant continues, stepping more deliberately. The food source scent grows stronger and the ant moves toward it now.
A structure many ants high lies ahead, its rounded edges extending out beyond perceptibility. The food source, its acidity more pronounced is somewhere inside. The ant thrusts its anterior gaster segment groundward, secreting a pheromone scent trail for the other workers to trace. It approaches, antennae sensing then disregarding the unnatural angles of the structure’s opening. The surface of the food source is gritty but grippable, and the ant closes its mandibles around a manageable hunk. The pungency of its odor almost stings, but the ant swallows, permitting the morsel to travel as far as its first stomach.
Returning toward the opening, the ant senses then disregards the line of workers, sniffing out the scent trail.
The entry way is a vacant nail-hole in the grout ahead, between two ceramic tiles, its floor lined with a fine powder. The ant climbs inside, feeling the hunk of food source resting heavy in its gut.
More workers stand on the other side of the wall, waiting for the ant as though already aware she comes carrying the first bite off a newly discovered food source. They‘re thinking no such thoughts, of course, have only stopped because they know they must. The entryway isn’t wide enough to permit two to walk abreast. The scent trail has at this point been extended to the opening, and, after depositing the morsel inside the colony, the ant will return to follow it back to the food source, giving no further thought to how it came to be.
The darkness inside is a warm blanket, enveloping the ant. The line of workers resumes moving along the dusty pine ledge. Beyond the ledge lies an incalculable abyss. Those venturing beyond it had returned days later, empty stomached and fewer in number.
Ahead lay the Queen and the nurses tending spawn, alabaster and immobile. The ant regurgitates the hunk of food source at Her feet, and the nurses crowd to sniff. The ant senses a scent trail leading out of the colony into the opening at the end of the ledge, strong enough now to remove all doubt…
The ant waits its turn then lays its gritty tribute before the Queen. The ant senses a scent trail but its legs buckle beneath it and ignore repeated commands to straighten. Its antennae quiver detecting the nurses, who’ve either ceased to move or wandered away to leave the spawn unattended. The spawn are still as before, but they no longer throb with life force. The Queen’s wings flutter, and then they do not.
Mice again, but this time you’ve got a small dog whose impossibly slender legs might snap beneath a trap’s spring loaded brass bar. So you opt for the adhesive variety, though you can’t imagine them actually working. Mice are smaller than you’d remembered, and quick, surely too nimble-footed to find themselves caught in a cardboard death device promising nothing but viscous entrapment.
But in the morning, there it is nonetheless, its tiny foot pads held fast to the floor of the flimsy, open ended envelope. Your tiny dog crouches nearby, sensing the tinier animal’s panicked palpitations but wary of its twitching inkblot eyes, the whipping of its wormy tail.
You clamp the trap between your thumb and middle finger, unconsciously refusing to bend your elbow as you carry it out the back door, and extending it away from your body when you unhook the gate.
After opening the dumpster, you pause, considering the shivering thing’s ultimate fate, sealed in a swampy hot metal box, dehydrating or starving as its smothered beneath ever thickening piles of savory garbage.
You drop the box on the ground, meaning to flatten it with your foot. An image halts you mid-stomp: The mouse squashed, squeaking a death cry to shrill for human ears; the last sound it hears the matchstick snapping of its own spine, its last sensation the squirting of its eyeball from a squashed socket.
You return your foot carefully to the ground and stoop to retrieve the trap. You drop it in the dumpster, where it lands in a pile of uprooted ragweed, and struggle not to hurry inside.
The next morning, you wake to the garbage truck’s metallic scrapes as it grasps the dumpster and upends it, emptying the contents into its cylindrical receptacle.
The mouse, buried beneath layers of sun heated polyurethane bags comes to rest several miles later -- upside down and staring into the open mouth of a tomato soup can, only partially emptied. If it's lucky, it is eaten by a cat.
The bird couldn’t fly in a cast. It would need time to get better and animals can’t go inside the hospital. The bird is lying down again. Its chest gets bigger when it breathes. You spread its wings out, long feathers joined by thin elastic skin like a Chinese fan. The bone ends scrape together, and you let go.
Maybe the bird just needs help to take off. If you help it get up into the air it can fly back home to its nest. You carry back over to by the fence where you found it. The bird’s claws try to make a fist around your thumb. You throw it high up over the fence but it doesn’t even try to fly. It plummets and makes a plop on the other side, but it doesn’t bounce.
Before it’s time to go inside you look through the crack at the bottom of the gate to see if the bird is still there. It lies on its broken wing in the alley dirt looking up into the sun. Ants march in lines from their dark hill to the hurt brown bird and back again. The ants are the black and red kind that bite and they crawl in between its feathers. Their antennas feel its skin for a good place for their tiny teeth to tear off little hunks of bird meat that the ants will take back to their hill to feed their queen. The bird’s wing makes an worthless flap every time its heart beats.
Ants are crawling in its eye.
The stainless steel box, measuring approximately 23.5 cm (9 in.) x 17.8 cm (7 in.) x 14 cm (5.5 in.) sits, as per its included instruction pamphlet, lengthwise parallel to an interior garage wall beneath a dust-furred queen-sized headboard made from knotty pine. A less than average-sized member of the species mus musculus (common gray-brown house mouse), scouring the vinyl baseboards in paranoid fits, approaches the box cautiously, roseate nostrils aquiver. The mouse moves to circumvent the box, but halts at the corner, sensing the void ahead. Cutting sharp the corner, the rodent feels cold metal brush against its fine hackled hairs. Its whiskers sense an opening just above its head. The mouse tips back onto its haunches to hook its front feet over the hole’s bottom lip and pulls itself inside. The hole leads to a cylindrical tunnel of molded black plastic. The springed pressure plate clicks, triggered by the mouse’s 14 g (.5 oz.) mass, and the cylander spins, tumbling the mouse through a rectangular opening onto its back. Once the tunnel’s completed its rotation, the compartment is sealed. The mouse shrieks and scurries through the open air until it’s righted. The Other lies in a corner, emitting a distressed odor, but hardly moving save it’s shakily pulsating heartbeat, which sends infinitesimal tremors across the compartment floor. It’s not resting in close proximity to a food source, so the mouse moves on to the other corners, quickly determining them barren. The mouse pushes off its back legs, scraping its nails against the slick, unyielding surface. The Other’s palpitations slow then altogether cease. The mouse sniffs at its emaciated carcass. Trembling, the mouse presses its snout beneath the Other’s fur and begins nibbling at its flakey, sour skin. The fat-encased intestines, once bitten into, expel a sugary, decadent gas, causing the mouse to look away..
Above, the cylinder again clicks and tumbles, depositing a new other on the cold metal floor. The Other silently regains its footing and scurries straight toward the corpse. The mouse bares its blood-blackened teeth, and the Other hesitates. The mouse returns its attention to the corpse’s tender spoiled interior, grinding hunks of colon, damp and gritty, between its teeth. The Other takes a position just out of reach and begins chewing at the tip of the corpse’s limp, scaly tail.
When the skeleton’s bones have been gnawed marrowless, the mouse again explores the vacant corners again, pushing itself up against the walls, as though it’s discovered another opening, this one just out of reach. It tips weakly back, and the other is at its throat, tearing at its windpipe. The mouse twists and convulses underneath, shrieking and clawing at the Other’s eyes. A claw lacerates a cornea, and the mouse pushes its toes into the hot ooze.
While the mouse slurps at the gelatinous goop, the Other squeaks and pantomimes a scurry, its paws unable to gain purchase on the cold steel.
Sniffing at the wall, the mouse feels a whisker poke through into the open outside air. It presses its nose to a hole just large enough to encircle it The mouse soon finds another of identical size, then another. This is a perforated window designed to permit viewing of the status of the trap’s takings without first sliding open the thin steel door. The cylinder overhead clicks again, and a new Other lands, snapping brittle bones beneath it. Paper thin skin crackles like dried papyrus. The mouse rushes to meet it.
The ant, not named, skitters noiselessly across a heavily enameled particle-board countertop. A mass once edible but now hardened beyond breaking impedes its intended path and must be circumvented. The room’s brightness, a potential danger is registered then all but disregarded.
The ant inhales, still unable to determine the exact location of the potential food source. The scent, too faint to pinpoint, is sweet but faintly astringent, a combination closer to citrus than rotting flesh. The ant turns back toward that inedible coagulation and begins to jab at it with frantic antennae, confirming its complete impenetrability before it moves on. A much larger presence looms just beyond perceptibility, but the ant continues, stepping more deliberately. The food source scent grows stronger and the ant moves toward it now.
A structure many ants high lies ahead, its rounded edges extending out beyond perceptibility. The food source, its acidity more pronounced is somewhere inside. The ant thrusts its anterior gaster segment groundward, secreting a pheromone scent trail for the other workers to trace. It approaches, antennae sensing then disregarding the unnatural angles of the structure’s opening. The surface of the food source is gritty but grippable, and the ant closes its mandibles around a manageable hunk. The pungency of its odor almost stings, but the ant swallows, permitting the morsel to travel as far as its first stomach.
Returning toward the opening, the ant senses then disregards the line of workers, sniffing out the scent trail.
The entry way is a vacant nail-hole in the grout ahead, between two ceramic tiles, its floor lined with a fine powder. The ant climbs inside, feeling the hunk of food source resting heavy in its gut.
More workers stand on the other side of the wall, waiting for the ant as though already aware she comes carrying the first bite off a newly discovered food source. They‘re thinking no such thoughts, of course, have only stopped because they know they must. The entryway isn’t wide enough to permit two to walk abreast. The scent trail has at this point been extended to the opening, and, after depositing the morsel inside the colony, the ant will return to follow it back to the food source, giving no further thought to how it came to be.
The darkness inside is a warm blanket, enveloping the ant. The line of workers resumes moving along the dusty pine ledge. Beyond the ledge lies an incalculable abyss. Those venturing beyond it had returned days later, empty stomached and fewer in number.
Ahead lay the Queen and the nurses tending spawn, alabaster and immobile. The ant regurgitates the hunk of food source at Her feet, and the nurses crowd to sniff. The ant senses a scent trail leading out of the colony into the opening at the end of the ledge, strong enough now to remove all doubt…
The ant waits its turn then lays its gritty tribute before the Queen. The ant senses a scent trail but its legs buckle beneath it and ignore repeated commands to straighten. Its antennae quiver detecting the nurses, who’ve either ceased to move or wandered away to leave the spawn unattended. The spawn are still as before, but they no longer throb with life force. The Queen’s wings flutter, and then they do not.
Mice again, but this time you’ve got a small dog whose impossibly slender legs might snap beneath a trap’s spring loaded brass bar. So you opt for the adhesive variety, though you can’t imagine them actually working. Mice are smaller than you’d remembered, and quick, surely too nimble-footed to find themselves caught in a cardboard death device promising nothing but viscous entrapment.
But in the morning, there it is nonetheless, its tiny foot pads held fast to the floor of the flimsy, open ended envelope. Your tiny dog crouches nearby, sensing the tinier animal’s panicked palpitations but wary of its twitching inkblot eyes, the whipping of its wormy tail.
You clamp the trap between your thumb and middle finger, unconsciously refusing to bend your elbow as you carry it out the back door, and extending it away from your body when you unhook the gate.
After opening the dumpster, you pause, considering the shivering thing’s ultimate fate, sealed in a swampy hot metal box, dehydrating or starving as its smothered beneath ever thickening piles of savory garbage.
You drop the box on the ground, meaning to flatten it with your foot. An image halts you mid-stomp: The mouse squashed, squeaking a death cry to shrill for human ears; the last sound it hears the matchstick snapping of its own spine, its last sensation the squirting of its eyeball from a squashed socket.
You return your foot carefully to the ground and stoop to retrieve the trap. You drop it in the dumpster, where it lands in a pile of uprooted ragweed, and struggle not to hurry inside.
The next morning, you wake to the garbage truck’s metallic scrapes as it grasps the dumpster and upends it, emptying the contents into its cylindrical receptacle.
The mouse, buried beneath layers of sun heated polyurethane bags comes to rest several miles later -- upside down and staring into the open mouth of a tomato soup can, only partially emptied. If it's lucky, it is eaten by a cat.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
The Good News
A Story Somewhat in the Telegraphic, Schizophrenic Manner of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
This story happened a long time ago in a church. Things were very different then. A church was a building where crowds of depressed and frightened people would gather and sing love songs to a two-thousand-year-old corpse. They would stand up and sing these songs as loud as they could, pushing with their diaphragms until they got light-headed from the lack of oxygen intake. They called this feeling “being filled with the spirit.” Sometimes they would pass out because they kept their knees locked for too long and cut off the circulation to their legs, or they would collapse from exhaustion after jumping up and down for several hours. When this happened, they called it a religious experience.
The hero of this story was a man who had had many religious experiences and claimed to have talked personally with the two-thousand-year-old-corpse. He told the people in the church that the two-thousand-year-old corpse was on his side. The people in the church, the congregation, laughed at him. They laughed, not because he said he’d been conversing with a corpse, but because they all agreed that the corpse was actually on their side.
The church in this story was a black church. The church building itself was not black. It was made out of red bricks. The people inside the church were black. In those days, people were divided into social groups based on the amount of melanin in their skin. Black people, who weren’t technically black, had more melanin in their skin than white people. The hero of this story was considered white, although he was technically a light brown color. He was the president of America.
The president of America was a white man who was always on TV. It was like being the spokesman for all the big businesses in the world.
The black people laughed when the president of America said the two-thousand-year-old corpse agreed with him about the war. They all thought the corpse agreed with them. A war happened when the white men in America dropped bombs on brown people in other parts of the world. A bomb was a big hunk of metal filled with radioactive material that was dropped from the sky. When it hit the ground, it caused an uncontained nuclear reaction and turned all the brown people under it into shit stains. All it left behind after it exploded was a big, penis-shaped cloud. The more melanin a person had, the less they liked war.
The president of America wasn’t at the black church to sing love songs to the corpse. He was there because he needed to get the black vote. A vote was when people decided who the next president of America would be.
The hero of this story was a member of a club called the Skull and Bones. The Skull and Bones usually picked the president of America by letting him be on TV so people would vote for him. Usually, being a Skull and Bones would be enough to be president of America, and the hero would not have had to worry about getting the black vote. This time it was different though, because the other white man people were voting for was also a Skull and Bones. The vote was going to be close, so the hero needed the black vote. It was called the black vote because it described the way people with more melanin voted. The more melanin a person had the less likely they were to vote for president of America.
Everyone in this story is dead. One of the love songs people in the black church sang went like this:
Some glad morning,when this life is o’er
I’ll fly away
The people in the black church thought that the corpse had magical powers. They sang songs about dying like it was something to look forward to, because they believed that the corpse would raise them from the dead so that they could live with it forever in a castle in the sky.
The people in the black church laughed at the president of America for saying that the corpse was in favor of the war. They said that the president of America was being unrealistic.
There was a line in a book about the corpse that said:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The people in the black church showed this line to the president of America. They said this meant that the corpse was against the war because no one would like bombs to be dropped on them.
The president of America pretended not to hear this. He said that he had always loved black people, and he had always wanted them to have the same opportunities that people with less melanin had. The people in the black church laughed again.
In those days, the amount of melanin in a person’s skin determined how successful they were. The more melanin a person had, the less people wanted to give them things like jobs or education.
A little over a hundred years before that, there were plenty of jobs for people with a lot melanin. They were all given jobs as slaves. A slave was a person with lots of melanin who picked cotton all day for a person with only a little melanin. Cotton was a plant from which people made clothes. Clothes were things people put on themselves to hide their penises and vaginas from each other. Plants were green things that grew up out of the ground.
After slaves picked the cotton, they gave it all back to the white person who was called the owner. After a few hundred years of this, the man who was president of America then said that all the slaves were free. This caused a war between the people who didn’t want to free their slaves and the people who didn’t have any slaves. This was called a civil war, because the people with very little melanin actually killed each other.
The slaves who were free couldn’t find jobs doing anything besides picking cotton for the same white people. Since they were free now, they only had to give the white people most of the cotton they picked. This was called social progress. In the time of our story, people were free to work wherever someone would hire them, no matter how much melanin they had in their skins, as long as they gave part of what they made to the government. The government was a big group of white men like the president of America. This was called civil rights.
The president of America ignored the people in the black church when they started laughing again. He said that he had worked harder to let people with lots of melanin go to school than any other president of America ever had. The people in the church laughed until tears came out of their eyes.
School was the place a person went to get an education in those days. How much melanin a person had determined what they learned there. A person with a lot of melanin was taught how to play sports. Sports were what people watched on the TV when they weren’t watching the president of America. In sports, a group of people with lots of melanin would fight with another group of people with lots of melanin over a ball. Sports were very popular in America and made a lot of money. Money was what people in America used to decide how important someone was. Almost all of the money from sports went to white men, called owners. The president of America was an owner.
A school like Yale, where the president of America went, taught men with very little melanin how to make lots of money. Skull and Bones, the club the president of America belonged to, taught men how to become the president of America and do favors for other members of the Skull and Bones club.
The president of America said that the congregation could laugh all they wanted to, but he was telling the truth. He said that the corpse wanted him to be president of America, and if they really loved the corpse they would vote for him. He said the corpse wanted him to be president of America because he was a good person and tried to make everyone in America do what the corpse said to do in his book. He said he wanted to let people talk out loud to the corpse in schools, and stop people from rubbing their penises and vaginas against each other unless they were married.
A marriage was a legal ceremony where people promised to love each other forever. Love was the word people used to describe the chemical reaction that released endorphins and pheromones into their brains and made them want to rub their penises and vaginas against each other. Sometimes people said that the corpse loved them or that they loved it. This was considered a normal thing to say.
People got married so that they could rub their penises and vaginas together without being sinners. Sinners were people who did things in public that the corpse said not to do. Good people did these things too—they just did them in private and lied about them later. The people in churches thought that only good people could live in the corpse’s castle in the sky. When sinners died, they would go to a dark cave underground and be on fire forever. This was called the good news.
The president of America wanted to keep two people with penises or two people with vaginas from getting married to each other. He said that people who rubbed two penises or two vaginas together were sinners whether they were married or not. The people in the black church didn’t laugh at this. Some of them said amen. Amen is what someone said when they agreed.
When the president of America joined the Skull and Bones club, he was shut up inside of a coffin and had to tell all the other members what he had done with his penis and whose vagina he had rubbed it up against. Later, when he was president of America, they could use these stories to get him to do what they wanted him to. In those days, it was very important to people that the president of America’s penis stayed inside of his clothes.
After the president talked about controlling what penises and vaginas were rubbed against, the people in the black church clapped their hands. People clapped their hands to show that they liked what a person said.
The president decided to quit while the people were on his side, and started to wrap things up. He said that people with different amounts of melanin in their skin were equal and deserved the same opportunities. He said that the war would end as soon as all of the bombs were dropped and all of the brown people were shit stains. And he asked the two-thousand-year-old corpse to continue to use its magical powers to make America the most powerful country in the world. Everyone in the black church clapped and a few of them even said amen.
When the people in the black church were shown on TV that night clapping for the president of America, the reporter said this meant that the president of America had the black vote and would win the election. A reporter was a person who told everyone what the things they saw on TV meant.
The reporter was a member of the Skull and Bones club. He’d gotten a call earlier that day from one of the president of America’s Skull and Bones friends. The Skull and Bones man told the reporter to say that the president of America had the black vote. The Skull and Bones man said that if the reporter didn’t say this, the members of Skull and Bones would tell everyone how the reporter liked to rub his penis against other penises.
On the day of the election, none of the people in the black church voted for anyone. In fact, most of the people in America didn’t vote. They stayed home that day and watched TV or rubbed their penises and vaginas against whatever they wanted. The next morning, they turned on the TV to find out who the president of America was. This was called democracy.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Hog Heaven
(Note: Aside from the occasional bit of dialog scraping scar tissue in an aging screenwriter’s mind, all that’s left of the last planned Elvis Presley movie are two lines on a scrap of paper:
She (consulting notebook): How does this thing stay airborne without violating at least two of Newton’s laws?
He (wearing motorcycle helmet and scarf): Well hop on, Miss Brainy Pants, and I'll show ya!
News of the movie, delayed for months because of Presley’s unsightly weight issues and ultimately canned altogether due to the King’s untimely whatever (restroom angina, waxy body buried beneath a headstone misspelled and misplaced), will now satisfy an awaiting public, until now unaware of what exactly it is they’ve been awaiting all these cold and pointless years.)
[…]
Ext. Daytime: Shot from a flying contraption descending on the Parking lot of --------- STUDIOS. Zoom in on a group of three navy-shirted security guards surrounding a younger, better-educated man. The camera centers on him and draws in close; he’s shorter than the encircled guards, two of whom are currently gripping his shoulders and leading him out of the lots. This is Jeremy Martin.
Cut to: JM’s POV
JM watches the leading security guard (name tag reads: “Herschel”) out front, talking to JM while walking backward across the parking lot.
H : Now look, you, you told me you weren’t going to cause trouble. (He wheezes an asthmatic smoker's wheeze.) What would Grandma say about that college education now?
Pan down to JM’s red Nike Air Force 1s, lingering long enough to clinch an endorsement deal. The toes are now scuffed parking-lot gray. JM’s ripped right pants leg is still rolled up, revealing a navy dress sock and hairy, pale flesh. Herschel is still talking, but his voice drowns in the sound of scraping gravel. The camera swings up to reveal Herschel has left the frame; the only thing ahead now is a steel gate opening onto the street.
H (offscreen): (Indistinct)
Then the camera jerks up, and the other two guards shove JM. He lands, chest-first, in sun-sticky street tar. The camera switches to JM’s POV in time to catch an eyeful of asphalt. At this point it becomes obvious to the audience that what Herschel, in a sadly revealing moment, said earlier was “Have a nice trip, asshole!”
The camera struggles upward to show the now closed gate. Beside it, a telephone pole, and at the base a broken bike chain, roughly bolt-cuttered and discarded. Someplace incredibly nearby, a car horn honks.
[…]
The interview scene is key. The aging but acceptably slim A1C Aaron Aron O’Rion (ably played by a slimmer, post-detox you know who) has so far been only the one-dimensional flying-motorcycle-pilot stock character, but the audience is now supplied with a satisfying backstory and a new romantic angle, thanks to Ms. Janice Billings, a very pregnant local reporter (played by Ann-Margret -- post-Carnal Knowledge, of course -- with her gently maturing body wrapped snug in a fake belly-fat.) O'Rion has agreed to meet her in the emptied circus tent after an opening performance in East Saint Louis.
Billings stands eager-eyed, clutching a reporter's notebook, top spiral threaded with a pre-chewed fountain pen of a brand which would not be manufactured for at least 15 years after the film's implied setting. O'Rion, an unnaturally beautiful member of the Greatest Generation, must help out a woman in need. (And the way she clutches that notebook pushes her swelling chest up at O'Rion, making it impossible not to notice that she's begun lactating a bit, a damp spot expands on her blouse. Sexy it isn't, but give the wardrobe department points for authenticity.) So he tells her everything, or at least as much as is convenient, about his life as a traveling circus pilot, taking a flying motorcycle of questionable physic-probability on tour through the contiguous 48. He tells her he worked during WWII as an Air Force mechanic (but leaves out that a diminished lung capacity caused by a childhood bout with pneumonia kept him out of the pilot's seat) and that it was a mechanic buddy's idea to outfit a decommissioned service motorcycle with surplus aircraft parts.
Cue petroleum streaked flashback effects.
O'Rion, slathered with make-up and fit with a wig of crew-cut horse-hair plays wrench-bitch for fellow mechanic A1C J. Mar Manshadow. Manshadow, his face distorted by a thick pair of regulation glasses, the lenses smudged with grease, attaches various airplane parts to a military-issue motorcycle, seemingly at random. An all-too-conveniently placed blackboard in the background holds the workshop’s only schematic: a crude chalk drawing of a motorcycle fitted with wings and a propeller labeled "This."
Back in the tent O'Rion drops his head and charges past Billings offscreen. By the time she recovers from stunned silence to ask what's become of Manshadow, the only reply is the far away revving of a motorcycle engine.
O'Rion rolls onscreen on a Harley Davidson, winged and propellered. Billings at this point looks more startled than wooed. "I asked what –” BARRRRRROOOOOOMROOMROOM.
O'Rion, glad to have something loud enough to shut Billings down, has found his lady-melting grin again. At the now-famous invitation, Billings indeed hops on, and the two make tracks in the sawdust. The engine noise, having served its purpose, is mixed down until it's nearly inaudible, and the introductory chords of the obligatory musical number fade in. And sure, this interview ultimately leads to the article that metastasizes a flying motorbike into an international security incident, endangering the lives of most of the movie's major characters, but that hardly matters now as O'Rion -- perhaps in an attempt to fill the uncomfortable silence, or maybe in an attempt to distract himself from the near uncontrollable urge to stare at her premature lactation spotting -- breaks into song. The exhilaration of fresh-minted love is only slightly diminished by the nagging knowledge that no reputable doctor would ever allow a woman in such an advanced state of pregnancy to fly.
[…]
Ext. Day. A caption reads: “Residence of formerly famous screenwriter MR. --------, who wishes to remain anonymous for this interview.”
We approach the front door with an establishing steady-cam shot. JM's fist enter the frame and taps the unvarnished frame. Mr. answers. His face is back-lit, obscured by strategic interior lighting, and computer-blurred in post-production. He's holding something -- impossible to discern what exactly -- in front of hat's probably his mouth, or possibly his throat.
MR.: [Distorted]
JM: I'm sorry, what?
MR (louder, waving his device-free hand): [Distorted]
JM: ... Oh ... right.
Mr. stands back, and the camera enters the house now, POV swinging rapidly downward when it fails to anticipate a six-inch drop from the stoop to the entryway. When the camera repositions itself, we discover Mr.'s house is littered with cupboards and shelves of various porcelain figures. There’s a smell like rotting wet garbage, and lighting is a nightmare because there's no electricity. The camera scans the figurines, lingering longer than necessary on a small sad-faced hobo clown with a broken foot until the viewer begins to question (in a voice a little louder than necessary) whether some kind of anonymous interview is about to take place here or if the camera just invited itself over to this poor man's house to stare at his goddamn clown all day. He's got things to do, you know. The camera shakes for a moment and finds Mr., relocated on the sofa. Closeup of Mr.'s blurry, backlit face.
JM: So you said you were commissioned to write the screenplay for Elvis's last planned film?
MR: [Distorted]
JM: OK, I was worried about this. Your homemade voice disguiser just isn't working.
MR: [Distorted]
JM: What's wrong with it is that no one in the audience will understand a word you're saying.
MR(clearly upset): [Distorted]
JM: Of course I understand that you want to be anonymous here, but this one-sided dialog is forcing me to adopt a sort of Bob Newheart-style banter where I'm repeating whatever you've said and trying to inconspicuously incorporate it into my response. It's completely unnatural, and I refuse to do it anymore.
MR: [Distorted]
JM: No, not even then. Let's just get on with the interview. (Noisily gnaws pen while rifling through notepad). You said you knew this film had no hope of ever being made. Why?
MR(scratches blurred neckline and unblurred chest with alternately blurred/unblurred hand): [Distorted]
JM: Yes he could've. He so could have.
MR (shakes head, causing even more blurring): [Distorted]
JM: Well yeah, but what about crystal meth? He was already pretty heavy into pills at that point, you know.
MR: [Distorted]
JM: I heard you drop like 15 pounds a week on that (pauses to consider) but like five of that is probably just teeth and hair.
MR: [Distorted]
JM: I dunno, really. I think Drano is involved somehow.
The film's first version of the takeoff flashback is a 37-second clip wedged between the mild innuendos of the seduction scene. The motivations of mechanic Manshadow, his buzz-cut revealing the oblong curve of his head and his regulation-issue-mason-jar lens-corrected eyes signifying advanced intelligence, are unknown. According to O'Rion's voiceover, Manshadow simply thought collecting surplus aircraft parts in order to make a superior officer's unused motorcycle (a standard military job, olive green and obviously not the shiny Harley chopper of the interview scene) air-worthy would be a "real good idea." Several short scenes showing the passage of an undefined period of time focus on Manshadow hard at work adding airplane parts -- propellers, engine valves, what appears to be a comically oversized sparkplug -- to the motorcycle with no apparent blueprint in mind.
When he's not handing Manshadow tools, O'Rion seems completely disinterested, flipping through a probably anachronistic gentleman's magazine while Manshadow works. The end result seems to be a rough prototype of the current, sleeker model: The sidecar has been removed so that a lengthy and wobbly pair of wings can be attached, and an improbably small propeller extends upward on a pole protruding from behind the seat.
Manshadow climbs on and revs the engine. Whatever he shouts to O'Rion at this point is inaudible.
Manshadow scoots forward on the seat to open up about six inches of room on the back, which he then gives a gentle pat. For a moment, O'Rion considers climbing on, going so far as to straddle the bike standing up, a position which puts the crotch of his blue canvas jumpsuit in contact with Manshadow's mid-back. Whatever it is O'Rion says before shrugging his shoulders and scooting away cannot be heard.
O'Rion ends up watching on the runway while Manshadow's bike gathers speed. When he pulls back on the handlebars, it looks at first like he's just popping a wheelie on this clunking bike, but then the rear tire follows and spins free. He pulls up until he's silhouetted dark against the sun. The film's most beautiful shot, or what would have been at least had the film actually been made. Which of course it was not. Not. Made.
[…]
Int. Day. The Offices of -------- Studios film producer HUGH JASSPRICK (not his real name, but it should be), who, after considerable surprise at finding someone sitting in his locked office waiting for him to return from lunch, has agreed to a brief meeting before calling security, provided his name and/or likeness will never be associated with this project. HJ sits behind a heavy-looking oak laminate desk, his fat, stupid face hidden from a litigation-triggering medium close-up by 457 pages (what's happened to the 209 is anyone's guess) of the newly reconstructed Hog Heaven screenplay.
HJ (attempting to semidiscreetly plug his phone back into the wall socket): You've got time for one question, asshole. Make it count.
JM (struggling to read the sweat-obscured notes on his hand, the most legible of which appears to say, "Was Margret's pregnancy a social commentary or [illegible]?"): Um.
HJ (still fidgeting with phone cord): Let me ask you one, then. Let's pretend for a second we really were planning on making this movie at some point.
JM: If he had dropped some weight and cleaned up his act?
HJ: Sure, whatever. And let's pretend he laid off the bacon for awhile to delay his heart giving out on the fucking toilet (he stops to laugh at his own joke, the Falstaffian douche-nozzle) long enough for him to make a metaphorical shit pile instead.
JM (clears throat)
HJ: Whatever. We'll pretend all that. Hell, I'm willing to overlook the fact that your evidence here reads like it was written by that hack-turned-meth-addict, [Distorted], who's started lurking around the studio again. And we'll even try to pretend that the love song I'm looking at here isn't a blatant rip-off the one from that Disney movie where the lady makes it with a, a wildebeest or whatever. (The phone cord slips from his greasy sausage fingers and pops across the desk.) Look, (He grabs it again.) whatever. Even if all this were true, even if you did find evidence of some half-baked idea that never got made... (There's a slight click as the cord slips back into its socket.) What the hell are we supposed to do about it now?
The camera now swings down as JM checks the notes on his palm for an answer, but they've been sweated to smears.
JM: (Coughs silently).
HJ: That's pretty much what I figured.
We hear the sound of the phone's receiver (offscreen) being lifted from its cradle.
[…]
A swarm of Japanese fighter planes (piloted by Kamikaze sleeper agents just awakened) converges on the horizon. In the foreground stands the Statue of Liberty. The planes close in, dropping payload after payload into the Statue's concrete foundation. When a plane is spent, it circles one last time to gain speed before exploding itself into the Statue's face, breasts, or hair until only one plane remains. The Statue is still standing, though it shakes. The plane closes in fast then drifts out and away. Air Force fighters finally respond, but the final Kamikaze veers toward the torch. The ensuing collision causes the biggest explosion yet, and the lady topples, hitting the harbor behind her with a smaller splash than we've prepared ourselves for. Before long even her face has disappeared below the water's surface, leaving not even bubbles in its wake.
Hence: A decree banning Japanese Americans and those suspected of being Japanese-American from any form of air travel.
Thus: remaining Japanese agents are very interested to read Janice Billings' latest in the for some reason internationally monitored St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
So: The FBI is going to the circus.
[…]
Ext. Daytime. A branch of the Burbank, California, public library system. In the distance we see a man pedaling a bicycle toward the library, which, because of altered Friday hours, will close in approximately 12 minutes. The camera pulls in now to show the biker in greater detail. This, it’s now apparent, is Jeremy Martin. He’s standing up on the pedals, riding hard and fast. A backpack, overloaded with several unauthorized biographies of Suzanne Pleshette, hangs from his shoulders. The weight of these overdue books causes the bike to wobble. In the background we hear the buzzing of several still-crisp collectible trading cards, clothespinned to the spokes.
Now in front of the library JM gives the handbrake a squeeze too light to bring him to an actual stop, and he hits the steel bike rack harder than expected. The backpack’s momentum pulls it up, almost over his head, and for a brief but terrible moment we’re worried our hero will flip over the handlebars. He does not.
Cut to: Int. Library
An attractive, older librarian is organizing her desk, killing time until the end of the workday, which the clock behind her indicates is now approximately 10 minutes away. The quiet scene is interrupted by a door (offscreen) slamming open, followed by the muffled clomping of a pair of Air Force 1s rapidly carrying the poorly distributed weight of a shorter-than-average man and several hardcover books across Berber carpeting. The attractive, older librarian’s expression is one of brief surprise followed by the mixture of acceptance and dread that accompanies an undesirable but inevitable task. After some offscreen zipper-fumbling, unseen hands dump a stack of books on the desk. The camera cuts now to the attractive, older librarian’s POV.
JM (glistening with a light sweat sheen): I finally found those books.
AOL (reaching for rubber stamp): Great.
JM (breaking eye contact to stare at the books): You didn’t get a lot of complaints while they were out, did you?
AOL (Stifling a sharp laugh): Not really, no. I think the last person to check them out was either you or Suzanne Pleshette.
JM (quickly looking up): Really?
AOL (opening the top book to stamp it): No. (Adding the book to a cart behind her desk)
JM (scratches neck): Oh.
AOL (Grabbing rest of stack and placing them on rack without bothering to stamp them): Well, we’re about to close now, so…
When she turns back from the cart JM is already walk-jogging into the stacks.
He's heading for the fiction section, specifically for the shelves labeled BE-BR. The camera spins as JM rounds the corner, and without scanning the shelves lands on a thin paperback on the top shelf. We get a close-up of this book, written by one G.B. Giorgio, the camera breaks out of JM’s POV now to show the top of the book (which JM will not be able to reach unaided). A quarter -inch of a torn piece of typing paper juts from the book. The low-volume soundtrack for this scene is an extra-exultant cover of “Hey Jude.”
Cut to a wide angle profile shot of JM, reaching up toward the now-offscreen book, which is about eight inches above his grasp when he rocks onto the balls of his feet. After a few moments of useless stretching, he grabs the shelf below the book, and plants a foot on the case's base. After a few test pushes, JM jumps off bottom shelf, taking an uncoordinated swipe at the desired book, but he lands empty-handed. His second effort – this time pushing off the bottom shelf with both feet – is more successful. He gets enough height on this jump to reach over the book and pull it down, but the toes of his shoes wind up wedged between the second shelf and the books below it. JM lands on his back and the soundtrack’s "nanana"s (growing progressive louder) are momentarily interrupted by the dull crack of his head against a shelf behind him. He lands hard, legs spread and feet still stuck, but he’s got the book and he’s still conscious. The moment of small triumph is interrupted however, by the camera’s subtle upward shift. The collision with JM’s head has dislodged a thick, misshelved reference book (a circa-WWII guidebook for comedic performers in traveling attractions). The book now briefly teeters at shelf’s edge before tumbling over. A corner of its spine lands first, its direct collision with the ground cushioned by JM’s left testicle. The song achieves its famed climax.
[…]
We know instantly that the peanut vendor is a Kamikaze. His heavily accented solicitation lacks the season of a practiced nut man, and his underhand toss is herky and unconfident. Plus there's a radio antenna protruding from one of his translucent paper nut sacks. He's got the corner of his mouth twisted toward the antennaed bag, French exhaling a quick stream of Japanese and completely ignoring the customer trying to get his attention.
The man waving a strip-club fan of singles at the vendor is obviously FBI. An electrical wire, not at all concealed by his ill-fitting gray wig, protrudes from an earpiece of his faux-bifocals. He's only pretending to be interested in the peanuts, concentrating instead on whispering inaudible English into his microphone-equipped lapel pin, which proudly proclaims "Ask me about my grandson!"
The camera pulls back, and we get the whole audience, sitting in rows of splintered wooden benches. Approximately 97 to 98 percent of the audience is composed of males between the ages of 25 and 50, average-to-above-average height, either Caucasian or Pacific Asian. An abnormal population disbursement for a low-budget circus for sure – a fact poorly disguised by the pseudo-familial groups into which the men have attempted to organized themselves. Some only slightly stretch credibility as sweater-clad, pipe-chewing father figures, but discretion dictates that many more disguise themselves in sundresses and floppy straw hats, propellered beanies or pigtailed wigs, clutching rag dolls or homemade slingshots. Offscreen, a drum rolls, and the camera spins ring-ward toward the swirling spotlight. An engine putt-putts, too anemic for the expected Harley.
In its lieu an overheating clown car in need of a valve job to the tune of a wheezing calliope. Through the windshield we see the clowns who, suspiciously, are all sad faced. (Barnum and Bailey's Encyclopaedia Clownananica dictates a ratio of five to six happy-faced for every sad-faced.) The clowns are sad-faced in both the figurative and literal sense because their mouths strain to contain their discomfort at being so tightly wedged. When the car finally comes to a stop, its continued shake is due not to an idling engine, but because these "clowns" struggle and shove, apparently ignorant of how to extract themselves.
A canned fire siren screams. Some inaccurate-looking yellow-faced Asians in firefighter suits come running toward the car with some extremely accurate-looking axes. But the plastic-hatted "firemen" use the axes only to chop open car's plywood doors so the "clowns" can squeeze out. They come brandishing seltzer bottles. The "clowns" immediately spray the "firemen" with their "seltzer." (The word "seltzer" placed in quotes because the “firefighters” plastic coats, once sprayed, begin to bubble.) The "car" gets quotes now too, for the oblong, tail-finned, and suspiciously atomic-looking metal blimp-like object secured with expertly knotted rope to its roof.
The crowd has grown somehow quieter. And the performers circle one another, though they don't appear to feel quite secure enough in their assumed identities to actually split into teams. From outside the tent, a fireman, his comically oversized badge identifying him as "Fire Marshal," and a sour-faced older clown dressed in a sparkling sequined top hat and floral-print muumuu wheel in the apparent show stopper: a large, unnervingly authentic-looking confetti cannon. The performers in charge of wheeling the cannon out look tense, and it's probably the sweat on the old drag queen's hardened brow that first clues us in that the confetti cannon is in fact a "confetti" cannon pointed straight at the object on the clown car's roof. The string -- which will, it's implied, fire the "confetti" payload -- is for the moment in the hands of the "fire marshal." But then a “seltezer” stream arcs across the screen, and it becomes apparent that: 1) the change has been made to slo-mo, and 2) someone's finger slipped. Perhaps the ludicrously slow speed at which this "seltzer" travels is intended to allow us each (as audience members) time to contemplate the consequences, and ultimately our own personal, non-fictional demise. When the "seltzer" hits of course -- this time a full-on face shot -- the "fire marshal" staggers backward screaming, and the film speeds up as he pulls the string.
The subsequent burst of multicolored paper is at once relieving and not a little disappointing. Apparently someone -- "firefighter," clown, firefighter or "clown" -- accidentally, purposefully or purposefully accidentally loaded the "confetti" cannon with actual confetti.
And,that's the previously agreed-upon cue for A1C O'Rion. Guns are drawn when he enters, and the male portion of the audience is on its feet, headed for the ring. We cut now to the remaining two-to-three percent of the audience, a single, very pregnant redhead. Offscreen, the engine growls.
The shot cuts back to O'Rion now doing laps, herding the agents and Kamikazes by threat of tire treading to the ring's outer edge, momentarily opening a space large enough for takeoff. Maybe it's foreshadowing when the popped wheelie jerks artificially, or the bike's supporting wires momentarily glimmer. Once airborne, instead of taking the expected direct route toward Ms. Billings, though, he performs the standard routine, circular laps expanding then contracting around the tent. Suspicious, especially after a facial close-up reveals the panic on O'Rion's face when he finally picks Billings out of the crowd. The agents and Kamikazes, thanks to this impotent gaze, shift their focus to her. Now side by side and nearly indistinguishable, they mumble to one another the standard Hollywood filler word "rutabaga." Strangely, the screenwriter's notes not only specify that the spies mutter "rutabaga," the parentheticals call for the crowd noise to gradually increase from a just-perceptible murmur to an unmistakable shout.
The motorcycle maintains the same height and trajectory, though, making lap after lap without ever coming closer Billings' eager outstretched hands. Out of frustration she casts beseeching eyes upward. So we finally see it – the yellow and industrial-looking object hanging over a hole in the tent's ceiling. The crane suspending O'Rion's "flying" motorcycle on its guide wires. And it's then we realize just how irredeemably fucked he is.
[…]
Cut to a medium shot of a stall door in the library's men’s room. The door opens and JM, book in hand, emerges after a brief damage check, triumphant but pale. The camera follows JM toward the restroom’s exit. He stops briefly at the mirror and sink area, already occupied by a hairy, shirtless man. The man is scrubbing himself red with a rough, hand-soap-saturated paper towel, though underneath the foam, his skin seems to have a permanent layer of imbedded black dirt. His face's reflection is covered with either shaving cream or thickly lathered handsoap, which noiselessly pops and fizzles while it dries on the mirror's glass surface.
JM: I think the library’s closing soon.
MAN: [Unintelligible grunt]
[…]
When the lens comes unsmeared, we get a rehash of the earlier takeoff scene. A1C Julian Manshadow wrestles his modified bike into the air, seemingly defying the laws of physics by willpower alone. Exactly as before, the flight begins clumsy and jerky – Manshadow’s never controlled the bike in the air, after all. But he gets some altitude, and the turbulence smooths. O’Rion watches from the ground, looking delighted. But then those handsome features twist and expand in horror, and the shot cuts quick to Manshadow’s motorcycle, more than one mile above the earth now and starting to shake.
When the propeller snaps free, Manshadow actually reaches up for it as if he might reattach it, mid-flight. Then the front wheel tips forward, and he grabs the handlebars, throwing himself backward, still hoping to glide to safety. The handlebars don't budge, though, and his shoulders pop audibly (the struggling engine has at this point already sputtered dead). He throws his head back with enough force to lose his glasses, and we know for certain when we see those black-frames plummet. The slow-motion drop through the frame's bottom while Manshadow squints but never screams seems almost redundant.
[…]
Ext. Dusk. We have time for a quick establishing shot of the now-closed building before the front door slams open, and JM -- backpack forgotten inside, but still white-knuckling that book -- limps toward the bike rack. Cut to a closeup of him popping open a padlock on the for-now unboltcuttered bike security chain, followed by a mid-angle of him pedaling down the road, leaning forward, ass off the seat. The stiff cards snap in the spokes. The camera speeds past the bike along JM's future path to show a nasty patch of sidewalk broken up by tree roots and raised about four inches.
JM's legs pump faster as he approaches, the front tire of his bike now dangerously close . The snapping card sound grows into a deep growl. The tire gets bigger, and its tread pattern becomes more detailed. The bike is ostensibly moments away from a tire-bursting, jeans-ripping collision. But as center-screen is filled with high-traction rubber, the tire comes up. JM pops a wheelie. Overhead, the blurry bike rolls on. The rear tire, looking extremely wide for a bicycle, comes up, sooner than the first had. The growling gets louder. We cut to a mid-range shot of JM straddling a circa-WWII military-issue motorcycle outfitted with a propeller and a pair of gawkily lengthy wings. He's up off the ground and revving the engine, peeling out into the sky. The camera swings around behind as the bike banks into the chemical-burned sunset. All the chrome parts, polished shiny, absolutely shimmer in the pink-and-orange glow. The bike pulls away -- shrinking to a speck, then dissolving into nothing -- and so, for all anyone knows, may never come down. And, after a few minutes of steady blank sky, you can't be sure it was ever really there at all.
( Note: The theme of this story is loneliness.)
Monday, October 13, 2008
American Pie (rough draft)
A long, long time ago
I watched Bill’s TV show
And prayed he’d never build a time machine
Cause I knew that if he had the chance
He’d charm my teenage mom out of her pants
And keep me from ever being conceived
But my faith in God was shattered
When Bill Nye studied antimatter
I began to panic
When he learned quantum mechanics
I swear I almost shit my pants
When I saw him make those neutrons dance
I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance
If Bill went back in time
So Bill Nye the Science Guy
Was sooner or later gonna travel through time
And hit my mom with some bad pickup line
Saying “Hey there, baby, your place or mine?”
“Hey there, baby, your place or mine?”
I never knew who my father was
I never asked my mom because
She always kind of freaked me out.
One day she looked deep in my eyes
Said my dad was the kid from Family Ties
But I knew she was telling sweet, sweet lies
I chalked it up to all the LSD
She took when she was pregnant with me
Early onset senility
A scientific impossibility! (Whoo!)
Back at his lab on the very same day
Bill made a time machine out of a Chevrolet
I knew he’d take my life away
The day Bill traveled time
I started screaming
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Was gonna travel back in time to my mom’s junior high,
And keep my dad from ever catching her eye
Nothing could stop him but I still had to try.
I jumped in the back of Bill’s car
With fungus in a jelly jar
I had a plan to save the day
When we got there I ran in my mom’s house,
slammed the door and locked him out
He wouldn’t keep my dad from getting laid.
I found my mom and used my confection
Designed to give her a yeast infection
She said she’d seen me somewhere before
But then a knock came at the door
I looked out the window, didn’t trust my eyes
A DeLorean was parked out in the drive
And I knew that I would stay alive
Even if Bill came inside
He got there too late
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Drove his Chevy to my Mom’s house
But my mom was too dry
He came back from his car with a tube of KY
And walked in on her with Marty McFly.
I watched Bill’s TV show
And prayed he’d never build a time machine
Cause I knew that if he had the chance
He’d charm my teenage mom out of her pants
And keep me from ever being conceived
But my faith in God was shattered
When Bill Nye studied antimatter
I began to panic
When he learned quantum mechanics
I swear I almost shit my pants
When I saw him make those neutrons dance
I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance
If Bill went back in time
So Bill Nye the Science Guy
Was sooner or later gonna travel through time
And hit my mom with some bad pickup line
Saying “Hey there, baby, your place or mine?”
“Hey there, baby, your place or mine?”
I never knew who my father was
I never asked my mom because
She always kind of freaked me out.
One day she looked deep in my eyes
Said my dad was the kid from Family Ties
But I knew she was telling sweet, sweet lies
I chalked it up to all the LSD
She took when she was pregnant with me
Early onset senility
A scientific impossibility! (Whoo!)
Back at his lab on the very same day
Bill made a time machine out of a Chevrolet
I knew he’d take my life away
The day Bill traveled time
I started screaming
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Was gonna travel back in time to my mom’s junior high,
And keep my dad from ever catching her eye
Nothing could stop him but I still had to try.
I jumped in the back of Bill’s car
With fungus in a jelly jar
I had a plan to save the day
When we got there I ran in my mom’s house,
slammed the door and locked him out
He wouldn’t keep my dad from getting laid.
I found my mom and used my confection
Designed to give her a yeast infection
She said she’d seen me somewhere before
But then a knock came at the door
I looked out the window, didn’t trust my eyes
A DeLorean was parked out in the drive
And I knew that I would stay alive
Even if Bill came inside
He got there too late
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Drove his Chevy to my Mom’s house
But my mom was too dry
He came back from his car with a tube of KY
And walked in on her with Marty McFly.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Thesaurus Maroon -- A YouSolveIt Mystery
His parents secretly hated him, so Thesaurus Maroon's real name was Yancy. Years of dictionary reading while boys named John and Michael played kickball gave Thesaurus an abnormally large vocabulary, though, so nearly everyone in the small town of Clarksville called him Thesaurus. And since he went to public school, most of his classmates were comparatively retarded, so he made money off them during summer break, using his superior intellect and knowledge of illustrated Sherlock Holmes adaptations to solve their mysteries. For fellow fifth graders and others, Thesaurus freelanced as a private investigator, finding answers for everything from missing bicycles to mysterious tingly feelings. When a case proved unsolvable, Thesaurus could usually pretend to explain it in polysyllabic words (such as "polysyllabic") until the client just nodded in feigned understanding and made an excuse to leave.
On the third day of summer break, Thesaurus opened his office for business, raising the garage door and setting the markered posterboard sign in front of his old metal desk. The sign read:
Hugh Munculi, Thesaurus' classmate, walked in, rapping his knuckles once on the doorframe before entering.
"Well," Hugh said. He opened his fist, revealing a quarter.
Thesaurus pulled a manilla envelope from a drawer and tossed it onto the desktop.
"You were right, Hugh," he said. "Your mother is having an affair."
Hugh grinned, grabbing the envelope, making to squeeze the brass brads.
Thesaurus waved a preventative hand. "Save the Freudian scene for the counselor. It's proof enough to get you new sneakers and a video game system, if you play it right."
Thesaurus produced another envelope from the drawer.
"What's that one?" Hugh asked, gripping the first in his lap.
"My copies," Thesaurus said. "I need new sneakers, too."
Hugh grew pale.
"You do like having both your parents living in the same house, don't you, Hugh?"
Later, Bags Douchely, 13-year-old leader of the Knifewound Gang, walked in, producing then pocketing what appeared to be a wooden nickel. He wore ripped denim and a black Jughead cap.Thesaurus cupped shielding hands around his crotch.
"Easy Yancy," Bags said. "I'm here to hire you."
Thesaurus' hands didn't drop. "That so?"
"Yeah," he said. "I need you to solve the mystery of why your breath always smells like my dog's nutsack."
Thesaurus closed his eyes a moment. "Nice try, Bags," he said. "But we found out in 'The Case of the Unscooped Poop' that your dog is neutered."
Bags was already ten feet down the sidewalk now, and laughing.
Janie Corruthers walked in, wearing a long black dress. Until YouSolveIt was revamped in the mid-1990s, Janie had been Thesaurus' secretary. These days, she was the school's star athlete and had two fathers.
She slapped a quarter, sweat slick and shiny onto the desk. One of her fathers had been killed the previous weekend.
"I need you to find god for me, Thesaurus," she said, and rubbing a red-rimmed nose. She wasn't the best looking girl in fifth grade, but she could sure fill out a training bra, sure as heck!
"What should I do when I find it?" Thesaurus asked, looking for nothing in an empty drawer. She'd caught him looking at her chest before.
"Nothing," she said. A tractor trailer had slid off an overpass in a rainstorm onto an SUV driven by Dad #2. "That's just between god and I."
"Between god and me, you mean," Thesaurus corrected. "Me meaning you, of course."
Janie blinked moist eyes.
The coin was damp and ungrippable, requiring Thesaurus to slide it off the desk.
Thesaurus made an appointment that afternoon to interview the pastor of the local non-denominational congregation, the First Church of Christ the Unspecified.
"What can I do you for?" the pastor asked, extending a thin ivory hand over a rack of aborted-fetus fliers.
"I need to find god in the next 24 hours," Thesaurus said. The pastor had a thin, cold grip.
"That should be easy enough," he said. "I talk with Him everyday."
"Great," Thesaurus said and flipped open a Big Chief Tablet ($1.99 before tax). "Mind if I listen in?"
The pastor's laugh could be accurately transcribed as follows: "Ha, ha."
"God rarely speaks in words, my boy," he said. "More often in feelings, the majesty of nature."
Thesaurus closed the pad. "That hardly seems transcribable."
The pastor nodded. "But that's faith. The evidence of things unseen."
"But my client's paying for proof."
"Faith should be proof enough for him. A faithful prayer can move a mountain into the sea."
"Her name is Janie, and one of her fathers died."
The pastor tapped neat-clipped nails on the pamphlet rack.
"Janie has two daddies?"
"Had."
The pastor thumbed at a fetus flier.
"Well, you might say that the AIDS virus is God's punishment for the sin of sodomy. Sounds hard, but the believer can find the work of the creator in it."
Thesaurus rubbed the quater's rough edges in his pants pocket. "Does god ever kill enemies with falling trucks?"
"His ways are often strange, but our mere existence is proof of His existence."
The pastor began walking Thesaurus toward the exit. "A scientist would tell you the same. Nothing spawns from nothing."
Thesaurus closed his eyes a moment. "Maybe, but after the creation what ensures continuance?"
And on a burnished throne sat god, dead as hell, not-watching the masterwork through rigor-mortised eyes, twitching only with the tunneling of interdimensional maggots. Decided deicide. That'll be a quarter.
Clarksville Community College's general science professor had her back to Thesaurus throughout their interview. With a streaked rag she erased a physics problem from the dry-erase board, sporadically spraying an ammonia-based cleaner.
"The concept isn't essential for the operation of the known universe," she said. "And it's therefore not scientifically relevant."
Thesaurus opened the tablet and unperched a sharpened #2 pencil (75 cents) from behind his ear. "If you can't observe it, it isn't there, in other words?"
"Not exactly, Thesaurus," he graying ponytail pendulated with the ever-widening erasure arcs. "Many subatomic particles are assumed to exist purely because other observable data indicate it."Her every movement jingled tiny tin bells on her festive but out-of-season holiday sweater.
Thesaurus closed his tablet. "So god is like a non-reacting, unobservable, theoretical particle?"
The board, now clean, smelled faintly like a wet bed. Still the professor continued wiping. "If you like."
The rag squeaked on the board.
"What's inside a quark?"
The professor did not turn around. "Have you considered meditation?"
"Ohhhh-mmmm," Legs crossed, eyes closed,Thesaurus sat contemplating on his desk. The infinity in a grain of sand. The slight dilution of the ocean's saline by one salivial gob. A single tractor trailer tumbling over an interstate guardrail. The vastness of space. The unknowable nature of god. The refunding of money. The universe was a complex entity in which Thesaurus was a single cell. Against its thick stone walls he scraped a smuggled spoon.
The DayGlo sign outside of Goat's Head Soup promised "Spirituality. Tobacciana. Chocolate Chip Cookies." Thesaurus pushed open the door, clanging a cowbell duct-taped to the door jamb. The barefoot man behind the counter hopped from his stool, shaking auburn dreadlocks.
"No one under 18 allowed on the premises." He tapped a sign saying the same.
"Sir," Thesaurus said in a deepened voice, "I suffer a pituitary problem."
The man nodded. "Oh, you're some kind of dwarf. My bad, dude."
"I need to know if god exists," Thesaurus said. "I need to prove it scientifically."
The man peered past his wire-rims. "Midget science fair, huh? I heard about that." Somewhere within the store countless incense sticks competed to determine whether the store would smell like balls or balls dipped in putrid garbage water. "You picked a tough project though, little man."
Thesaurus nodded, concentrating on breathing through his mouth. "I talked to a pastor today."
The man snorted. "Religion is necrophilia." He set a black nailed hand on Thesaurus' shoulder. "Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, they figured out they had to die, but instead of the usual coping mechanisms like planting a tree or getting their heads frozen, they convinced people they're something more. They promise all sorts of cool prizes if we remember their names while they rot in the ground."
Thesaurus moved, but the hand did not. "Then I talked to a science professor."
With his other hand, the man dug into his pocket. "Science is the Warren Commission." He extracted a small cellophane pouch of dried leaves labeled "Salvia Divinorum" and handed it to Thesaurus. "You got to look for god the one place you can trust. Inside your mind."
With homemade construction paper fliers (a 500-count multicolored pack -- $5.99) and an e-mailed chain letter (free), Thesaurus advertised an emergency prayer vigil that evening. Despite a forecasted thunderstorm, Clarksville's faithful assembled to pray that Mt. Sianide, the county's sixth largest point, be raised up and cast into the sea -- nearly 300 miles away. Through a red plastic megaphone ($15.99, receipt attached), he reminded the true believers that only salt water submersion would be acceptable for the poor lymphatic boy who'd requested the prayers. Simply dunking the mountain in a nearby lake or community swimming pool would be inconclusive and might even depress him to the point of lowering his T-cell count. So in English, Latin and imbecilic angel tongues, with folded palms raised, handsclasped, eyes both closed tight in reverence and opened wide in ecstasy, the prayers were offered while lightning singed the sky. From beyond the mountain, burnt clouds appeared and ruptured. Soaked, the faithful departed, the mountain no visibly closer to the sea. Thesaurus pulled his jacket over his head and began walking home.
Behind him, size 14 sneakers slapped the sidewalk. Bags! Before Thesaurus could spin around, a drop-shouldered charge sent him sprawling.
"Oh, Thesaurus, it's only you," Bags said, not trying to sound surprised. "You really should be more careful. With that jacket over your head, I thought you were an Arab."
On the concrete near Thesaurus' face, a nightcrawler thickly throbbed. By the time he stood, Bags had managed to cross the street.
"You'll prove nothing, Thesaurus," Bags said, holding his hands behind his back, his rain-soaked hat leaking streaks of black dye down his face. "Your obvious bias toward a Judeo Christian deity is shameful, and the way you've stereotyped and simplified Eastern religion is deplorable." He nailed Thesaurus with the hard-packed mudball he'd had hidden -- a ten point headshot. "Ya ignorant homo!"
Thesaurus spit mud. "Nice try Bags," he said, "but city council banned Arabs last fall." Bags, now retreating, appeared not to hear above his own guffawing.
Thesaurus was saturated and clammy when he got home, and he abandoned his muddy shoes on the porch. A parent watched TV through the closed bedroom door. In damp socked feet he climbed loudly upstairs to open the tub's hot water tap, then quietly downstairs to gank his father's pipe and matchbook from the den.
Naked in the hot water, he packed the pipe with salvia divinorum and deeply pulled, regretting it. He nearly dropped the pipe in coughing fit. He pushed his face under and drank from between his legs. He pulled again, holding in the hot, cruel smoke. In his throat he saw pus-filled pockets sprouting. He felt the pipe sink to the tub's bottom. Inside himself, forests grew where anything could hide. His face was a camping tent the rain could not soak through. Somewhere distant water splashed. Janie was in the tub, just beyond reach. She splashed again, and her hand nearly grazed his peepee. Janie was not in the tub, he told himself. In his parents' bedroom, someone giggled. Thesaurus coughed again. It was his mother.
His sneakers caked with crunchy mud, Thesaurus walked out to his office the next morning. He'd forgotten to close the garage door, and Janie sat cross-legged on his desk, waiting for him. Behind her stood Bags, rubbing her shoulders.
"Time's up, Yancy," Bags said. "You owe this girl an answer."
Thesaurus removed Janie's quarter from his pants pocket, holding it encircled in his thumb and forefinger. In the United States, this is the hand-sign for "everything's OK," but in many countries, it's considered an obscene gesture. He slapped it down on the desk beside Janie, causing her to flinch.
"Well," she said, "where's god?"
Thesaurus flashed a too-knowing grin.
"Man, motherfuck this horseshit!" he said.
On the third day of summer break, Thesaurus opened his office for business, raising the garage door and setting the markered posterboard sign in front of his old metal desk. The sign read:
Thesaurus Maroon
Private Investigator
25 cents plus expenses
Cases solved in 24 hours or your money back
Private Investigator
25 cents plus expenses
Cases solved in 24 hours or your money back
Hugh Munculi, Thesaurus' classmate, walked in, rapping his knuckles once on the doorframe before entering.
"Well," Hugh said. He opened his fist, revealing a quarter.
Thesaurus pulled a manilla envelope from a drawer and tossed it onto the desktop.
"You were right, Hugh," he said. "Your mother is having an affair."
Hugh grinned, grabbing the envelope, making to squeeze the brass brads.
Thesaurus waved a preventative hand. "Save the Freudian scene for the counselor. It's proof enough to get you new sneakers and a video game system, if you play it right."
Thesaurus produced another envelope from the drawer.
"What's that one?" Hugh asked, gripping the first in his lap.
"My copies," Thesaurus said. "I need new sneakers, too."
Hugh grew pale.
"You do like having both your parents living in the same house, don't you, Hugh?"
Later, Bags Douchely, 13-year-old leader of the Knifewound Gang, walked in, producing then pocketing what appeared to be a wooden nickel. He wore ripped denim and a black Jughead cap.Thesaurus cupped shielding hands around his crotch.
"Easy Yancy," Bags said. "I'm here to hire you."
Thesaurus' hands didn't drop. "That so?"
"Yeah," he said. "I need you to solve the mystery of why your breath always smells like my dog's nutsack."
Thesaurus closed his eyes a moment. "Nice try, Bags," he said. "But we found out in 'The Case of the Unscooped Poop' that your dog is neutered."
Bags was already ten feet down the sidewalk now, and laughing.
Janie Corruthers walked in, wearing a long black dress. Until YouSolveIt was revamped in the mid-1990s, Janie had been Thesaurus' secretary. These days, she was the school's star athlete and had two fathers.
She slapped a quarter, sweat slick and shiny onto the desk. One of her fathers had been killed the previous weekend.
"I need you to find god for me, Thesaurus," she said, and rubbing a red-rimmed nose. She wasn't the best looking girl in fifth grade, but she could sure fill out a training bra, sure as heck!
"What should I do when I find it?" Thesaurus asked, looking for nothing in an empty drawer. She'd caught him looking at her chest before.
"Nothing," she said. A tractor trailer had slid off an overpass in a rainstorm onto an SUV driven by Dad #2. "That's just between god and I."
"Between god and me, you mean," Thesaurus corrected. "Me meaning you, of course."
Janie blinked moist eyes.
The coin was damp and ungrippable, requiring Thesaurus to slide it off the desk.
Thesaurus made an appointment that afternoon to interview the pastor of the local non-denominational congregation, the First Church of Christ the Unspecified.
"What can I do you for?" the pastor asked, extending a thin ivory hand over a rack of aborted-fetus fliers.
"I need to find god in the next 24 hours," Thesaurus said. The pastor had a thin, cold grip.
"That should be easy enough," he said. "I talk with Him everyday."
"Great," Thesaurus said and flipped open a Big Chief Tablet ($1.99 before tax). "Mind if I listen in?"
The pastor's laugh could be accurately transcribed as follows: "Ha, ha."
"God rarely speaks in words, my boy," he said. "More often in feelings, the majesty of nature."
Thesaurus closed the pad. "That hardly seems transcribable."
The pastor nodded. "But that's faith. The evidence of things unseen."
"But my client's paying for proof."
"Faith should be proof enough for him. A faithful prayer can move a mountain into the sea."
"Her name is Janie, and one of her fathers died."
The pastor tapped neat-clipped nails on the pamphlet rack.
"Janie has two daddies?"
"Had."
The pastor thumbed at a fetus flier.
"Well, you might say that the AIDS virus is God's punishment for the sin of sodomy. Sounds hard, but the believer can find the work of the creator in it."
Thesaurus rubbed the quater's rough edges in his pants pocket. "Does god ever kill enemies with falling trucks?"
"His ways are often strange, but our mere existence is proof of His existence."
The pastor began walking Thesaurus toward the exit. "A scientist would tell you the same. Nothing spawns from nothing."
Thesaurus closed his eyes a moment. "Maybe, but after the creation what ensures continuance?"
And on a burnished throne sat god, dead as hell, not-watching the masterwork through rigor-mortised eyes, twitching only with the tunneling of interdimensional maggots. Decided deicide. That'll be a quarter.
Clarksville Community College's general science professor had her back to Thesaurus throughout their interview. With a streaked rag she erased a physics problem from the dry-erase board, sporadically spraying an ammonia-based cleaner.
"The concept isn't essential for the operation of the known universe," she said. "And it's therefore not scientifically relevant."
Thesaurus opened the tablet and unperched a sharpened #2 pencil (75 cents) from behind his ear. "If you can't observe it, it isn't there, in other words?"
"Not exactly, Thesaurus," he graying ponytail pendulated with the ever-widening erasure arcs. "Many subatomic particles are assumed to exist purely because other observable data indicate it."Her every movement jingled tiny tin bells on her festive but out-of-season holiday sweater.
Thesaurus closed his tablet. "So god is like a non-reacting, unobservable, theoretical particle?"
The board, now clean, smelled faintly like a wet bed. Still the professor continued wiping. "If you like."
The rag squeaked on the board.
"What's inside a quark?"
The professor did not turn around. "Have you considered meditation?"
"Ohhhh-mmmm," Legs crossed, eyes closed,Thesaurus sat contemplating on his desk. The infinity in a grain of sand. The slight dilution of the ocean's saline by one salivial gob. A single tractor trailer tumbling over an interstate guardrail. The vastness of space. The unknowable nature of god. The refunding of money. The universe was a complex entity in which Thesaurus was a single cell. Against its thick stone walls he scraped a smuggled spoon.
The DayGlo sign outside of Goat's Head Soup promised "Spirituality. Tobacciana. Chocolate Chip Cookies." Thesaurus pushed open the door, clanging a cowbell duct-taped to the door jamb. The barefoot man behind the counter hopped from his stool, shaking auburn dreadlocks.
"No one under 18 allowed on the premises." He tapped a sign saying the same.
"Sir," Thesaurus said in a deepened voice, "I suffer a pituitary problem."
The man nodded. "Oh, you're some kind of dwarf. My bad, dude."
"I need to know if god exists," Thesaurus said. "I need to prove it scientifically."
The man peered past his wire-rims. "Midget science fair, huh? I heard about that." Somewhere within the store countless incense sticks competed to determine whether the store would smell like balls or balls dipped in putrid garbage water. "You picked a tough project though, little man."
Thesaurus nodded, concentrating on breathing through his mouth. "I talked to a pastor today."
The man snorted. "Religion is necrophilia." He set a black nailed hand on Thesaurus' shoulder. "Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, they figured out they had to die, but instead of the usual coping mechanisms like planting a tree or getting their heads frozen, they convinced people they're something more. They promise all sorts of cool prizes if we remember their names while they rot in the ground."
Thesaurus moved, but the hand did not. "Then I talked to a science professor."
With his other hand, the man dug into his pocket. "Science is the Warren Commission." He extracted a small cellophane pouch of dried leaves labeled "Salvia Divinorum" and handed it to Thesaurus. "You got to look for god the one place you can trust. Inside your mind."
With homemade construction paper fliers (a 500-count multicolored pack -- $5.99) and an e-mailed chain letter (free), Thesaurus advertised an emergency prayer vigil that evening. Despite a forecasted thunderstorm, Clarksville's faithful assembled to pray that Mt. Sianide, the county's sixth largest point, be raised up and cast into the sea -- nearly 300 miles away. Through a red plastic megaphone ($15.99, receipt attached), he reminded the true believers that only salt water submersion would be acceptable for the poor lymphatic boy who'd requested the prayers. Simply dunking the mountain in a nearby lake or community swimming pool would be inconclusive and might even depress him to the point of lowering his T-cell count. So in English, Latin and imbecilic angel tongues, with folded palms raised, handsclasped, eyes both closed tight in reverence and opened wide in ecstasy, the prayers were offered while lightning singed the sky. From beyond the mountain, burnt clouds appeared and ruptured. Soaked, the faithful departed, the mountain no visibly closer to the sea. Thesaurus pulled his jacket over his head and began walking home.
Behind him, size 14 sneakers slapped the sidewalk. Bags! Before Thesaurus could spin around, a drop-shouldered charge sent him sprawling.
"Oh, Thesaurus, it's only you," Bags said, not trying to sound surprised. "You really should be more careful. With that jacket over your head, I thought you were an Arab."
On the concrete near Thesaurus' face, a nightcrawler thickly throbbed. By the time he stood, Bags had managed to cross the street.
"You'll prove nothing, Thesaurus," Bags said, holding his hands behind his back, his rain-soaked hat leaking streaks of black dye down his face. "Your obvious bias toward a Judeo Christian deity is shameful, and the way you've stereotyped and simplified Eastern religion is deplorable." He nailed Thesaurus with the hard-packed mudball he'd had hidden -- a ten point headshot. "Ya ignorant homo!"
Thesaurus spit mud. "Nice try Bags," he said, "but city council banned Arabs last fall." Bags, now retreating, appeared not to hear above his own guffawing.
Thesaurus was saturated and clammy when he got home, and he abandoned his muddy shoes on the porch. A parent watched TV through the closed bedroom door. In damp socked feet he climbed loudly upstairs to open the tub's hot water tap, then quietly downstairs to gank his father's pipe and matchbook from the den.
Naked in the hot water, he packed the pipe with salvia divinorum and deeply pulled, regretting it. He nearly dropped the pipe in coughing fit. He pushed his face under and drank from between his legs. He pulled again, holding in the hot, cruel smoke. In his throat he saw pus-filled pockets sprouting. He felt the pipe sink to the tub's bottom. Inside himself, forests grew where anything could hide. His face was a camping tent the rain could not soak through. Somewhere distant water splashed. Janie was in the tub, just beyond reach. She splashed again, and her hand nearly grazed his peepee. Janie was not in the tub, he told himself. In his parents' bedroom, someone giggled. Thesaurus coughed again. It was his mother.
His sneakers caked with crunchy mud, Thesaurus walked out to his office the next morning. He'd forgotten to close the garage door, and Janie sat cross-legged on his desk, waiting for him. Behind her stood Bags, rubbing her shoulders.
"Time's up, Yancy," Bags said. "You owe this girl an answer."
Thesaurus removed Janie's quarter from his pants pocket, holding it encircled in his thumb and forefinger. In the United States, this is the hand-sign for "everything's OK," but in many countries, it's considered an obscene gesture. He slapped it down on the desk beside Janie, causing her to flinch.
"Well," she said, "where's god?"
Thesaurus flashed a too-knowing grin.
"Man, motherfuck this horseshit!" he said.
SO SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS THE DAMNED ANSWER?
For the solution to this case, hold the page upside down in front of a mirror. Upon discovering there is nothing written at the bottom of this page, glance up at your own reflection's eye -- recognizably human-looking, sure, but, a centimeter beneath the smooth surface, an unpapered brick wall.
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