These nerves are voiceferous and restless, like a baby with Batman, a highball hangman, make them speak, red walls with dust, a sleeping woman, a YouTube chime in the head, celestial salad raining down from space. This world all nonsense, like the gravity of a rainbow, the yoga of a leprechaun, the salsa of Chen Chin Chong.
He feels plastic and numb. He feels as flat as a flatline. The interstellar heart like a champagne rowboat floating. He just realized that he no longer laughs. Does he even smile? For real? What does he feel? A perpetual boredom, a perpetual disinterest in life. The pharmacology of alteration. The pills keep us in line. Living life in short bursts, like fireflies in the grass, momentary blips of Hollywood, champagne bursting bubbles, rubble, glittering crackers. And why do we divine so much time to barely trying to survive? If we could just be what we wanted to be… Imagine the world. Instead, we wrap our wrecked minds around all the glittering nonsense, all the traps, all the worries, all the fucking battles with bread.
I fight to find purpose in my movements. I struggle to fill in the gaps between the numbers of the atomic clock. I ache to flow like the softest, unmuddied river. I wander like midnight in the gardens of Ankara. The tower bells toll. The smell of fertilizer comes from space, the air is wet, lights flicker, traffic groans out there on the great Interstate rolling west, rolling east, the great asphalt ribbon full of crazies and hipsters, and the dead, and the meek, the young ones rolling toward new life, the old ones rolling to final spaces and memories.
Sometimes I don’t even remember the days on which my parents died. Ah, this littered life, my constant motions, breathing but a tick, I’m a clock with a sock stuffed into the medusa obligate, like irate pyrite, irrational hawk men, desperate gold men, trapped in a Cripple Creek hotel room, dim and dark, gold and orange and green reflections on the streets, ghosts in the halls and I felt them there in that desperate getaway from death, the longitude all latitude, my drunken attitude, playing mechanical poker at the bar, alone, made her cry for the very first time on those streets of gray gold. The red brick buildings, the church on the hill with its faint stained-glass preaching pictures, and we drove in the night, and I made her cry under the mountain moon of blue.
An empty Coke bottle sits on a worn, brown Formica table in a restaurant booth. The resting back and seat padding of the booth is a sickly mustard color. A half-used plastic bottle of generic brand ketchup sits at the table’s edge along with a silver napkin holder, a miniature silo of sugar, salt and pepper shakers, and three plastic menus ripe with human disease.
The walls of the restaurant are half wood paneling—on the bottom half—and a pale-yellow paint job on the upper half. Crooked pictures depicting old time western scenes hang on the walls in various places. And old television set that no longer works is perched on its dusty metal cradle in one corner. The unplugged cord dangles behind it. Country music moans through the dusty speakers of a dime-store stereo that sits on the end of the lunch counter among a tangle of green vines from an overhead hanging plant in dire need of watering.
The windows along the booth are oily and smudged with the fingerprints of unruly, messy children. The scene through the windows is one of dry desolation, wayward desert brush, and purple-blue mountains rising in the distant haze. Sunlight streams in and casts perfectly cut geometric glows across the tables.
There’s the murmur of broken passions among the patrons that sit around there. Many are hard-working people with bitter assessments of the world and their talk of rebellion comes from deep within troubled, trembling souls encased in dusty work clothes. Others are merely travelers, passersby with no hint of what it’s like to live in a town that is merely a speck on a map, a quick piss stop on a highway, the dead end of a dream or two. These are the people on their way to somewhere more like paradise, bigger, brighter. They’ll talk about Feldspar, California with scathing laughter and jokes. “How can people live there…?”
People are living there, some have lived in Feldspar for a long, long time. People like Brady Gander who sits in the restaurant of bitter souls and eats a chicken pot pie with a cup of black coffee. People like Brady Gander who works on fixing cars at his very own Gander Auto Repair on the far-flung edge of town. The Brady Gander who spends his days beneath a propped-up hood and goes home every evening with greasy hands and beat up knuckles. The Brady Gander who once he showers all the grime and pain away goes into his padlocked secret room to have secret meetings with his Council of Mannequins. They love to talk about guns, and the government, and patriotism. They vote on their own brand of law making and they have a binder stuffed with papers that Brady Gander, being the official secretary, meticulously types up and prints off. But the newly enacted laws of pretend never leave the secret room. The only thing that ever leaves the secret room is Brady Gander, and maybe a mannequin or two or three or four or even five.
Brady Gander never married because he has problems with socializing and relating to others, especially women. They make him nervous, and he acts brash. His house is a squat place of little stature out behind the business. It’s the color of the desert around it so it blends in and sometimes vanishes all together, which Brady Gander likes. On the hottest days of the year, the house simply vibrates and moans like a highway mirage. Brady Gander has lived there for 23 years, and tonight he has a visitor.
The honking of the horn out at the fixing garage was incessant. Someone was desperate and determined, Brady thought as he walked with his LED lantern to see whoever it was. They must have seen the house lights on and put two and two together.
He arrived at the front of the shop to find a young woman leaning against the outside of her convertible and reaching in with her arm to press the horn. “Oh, thank God!” she said when she saw him. A nearby streetlamp cast her in a pinkish, yellow glow.
“Were you fixin’ on honking that thing all night,” Brady said to her, and then he spat at the ground. “Because if you were, you’d better think twice about it.”
She immediately straightened herself. “I’m sorry… It’s just my car keeps doing weird things and I need to get to Phoenix and, well, I was hoping you could look at it.”
“Weird things?”
“Like stalling out, jerking.”
Brady rubbed at his chin as he looked her up and down. “Shop’s closed until morning.”
“Ah shit,” she said, and then she started looking around as if she was going to find someone else more willing. “Ah, shit… Can I leave it with you for the morning then.”
“Sure,” he said, and he stepped closer and reached out his hand.
She didn’t know what he wanted her to do.
“Your keys,” he said.
“Oh, right. Here you go,” she hesitated to let him have them. “You aren’t going to steal it, are you?”
Brady laughed and turned his head and pointed. “Do you see that house back there. I’ve lived there for over 20 years. I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart. This is my business, my livelihood. I don’t steal people’s cars.”
She was looking around again. “Is there somewhere I can stay?”
“Hmm,” Brady thought aloud. “Well, I’ve got a spare room if I don’t creep you out too much.” He let out a nasally snicker.
Her expression soured. “Maybe I’ll just sleep in the car.”
“No, no, can’t let you do that,” Brady said. “All sorts of weirdos wander around here at night… All sorts. This happens more than you might think. People wander into my life. I never eat them if that’s what you’re thinking.” Again, he let out the nasally snicker. “What’s your name by the way? I’m Mr. Gander, but everyone just calls me Crazy Brady.”
“Lillian. Lillian Hampton.”
“Lillian Hampton? That sounds puffy and annoyingly self-important… Did you say something about Phoenix? Are you planning to rise in Arizona?”
“What?… One of my best friends is getting married there Saturday. In the hot city it is.” It was Thursday. “That’s why I need my car fixed. I’m in the wedding party.”
Brady watched her underweight body as she went to open the trunk and retrieve a bag. “Here, let me get that for you,” he offered. He could smell her feminine flowery scent as he got closer to her and grabbed the duffel. “Anything else?”
“Nope. I travel light.”
“Follow me then.”
The moment they got into the house Lillian sensed something was off. There was a strange smell, it was dimly lit, and someone was sitting on the couch, but they didn’t make a move when she approached to say, “Hello.”
“Is that a mannequin?” she asked Crazy Brady.
He whipped around to look at her as he worked to clean some of the mess in the kitchen. “A mannequin? Yes, it is a mannequin, but he’s much more than that. That’s Councilor Troy Brisbane. He’s a very important member of the board. Very powerful.” He watched her as she just stared at him. “Well, don’t be rude… Say ‘hello.’”
“Hello,” she breathed cautiously.
There was no reply from the plastic person. Councilor Troy Brisbane just smiled his fake plastic smile and said nothing.
“He’s just tired from all that impactful decision making he does,” Brady told her.
“Is this the couch I’m going to sleep on?” she wanted to know. “It seems dirty.”
“No, no. I told you I have a spare room… Right next to mine. Come on, I’ll show you.”
She followed him around a corner and down a short hallway. He opened a door. It squeaked. “Here you go.” He motioned with his old head. “Bathroom is right back over there if you want to clean up before going to bed. You know, get all that sticky road grime off your silky, sweet-smelling skin.”
He turned on the light for her and she poked her head into the room. There was a double bed, a dresser, a chair, a desk. It smelled funny, she thought, like musty old furniture, like musty memories.
“Do the doors lock?” she asked him.
“No, no. I removed most of the locks because… Well, my plastic friends tend to close themselves in… And if I’m not around when it happens, well, they can get violent and break things. But then again, without the locks, they often wander the house. It’s a challenging situation.”
She half scoffed; half laughed at him. “Are you being serious, Mr. Gander?”
He was very serious, and his eyes twitched in telling her so. “Yes.”
In the deep of night, Brady Gander went before the Council of Mannequins in the secret room. He walked back and forth across the cranberry carpet, tapping his knuckles together as he thought. Councilor Troy Brisbane tapped a yellow pencil at his center seat in synchronicity. “Will she still be here at the dawn of hounds?” he wanted to know. “You don’t plan on eating her, do you?”
Brady stopped where he stood and turned his head to look at the council. “I’m not a bad man,” he began to tell them. “I just have all these crazy thoughts in my head. I’ve tried to get help, but you know how it is out there in the real world.”
Pencil thin and eyeglassed Councilor Eduardo Greep leaned forward. “We really don’t.” He looked at the other mannequins before turning back to Brady. “But you didn’t answer the question, Mr. Gander… Do you plan on eating her?”
Brady took a moment to breathe. “I’ll try not to.”
Uptight Councilor Stella Spaceport smiled at his haphazard answer. “Does she have any weapons? Does she have anything of use to us?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Brady answered. “But we are running short on time. She’s planning on leaving in the morning.”
“Have you considered gassing her?” Councilor Greep asked.
“It’s crossed my wicked mind,” Brady said.
“But what’s the goal here?” Sharp-shooting Councilor Adam Eve demanded to know. “What is the end game for this girl? And for us? Do we simply want to play with her and send her on her way, or will she serve a greater purpose? If she is to serve no purpose, then let’s just get it over with. But if you simply want something pretty to look at, get yourself a plotted plant or a dirty magazine.”
“Orgy!” Rough around the edges Councilor Karl Capshaw stood and declared. “It’s been eons since we’ve had a decent orgy around here.”
There was a communal sigh. “Sit down, Karl, and oil your joints,” Councilor Spaceport said.
“Look,” Brady began to speak. “She expects me to fix her car, but what if I can’t. What if I purposely keep her stranded?”
“I thought she was attending a wedding,” Councilor Brisbane pointed out. “Surely, she’d find alternative transportation. No. Something more drastic, something more physical must happen to keep her here. And I for one will make it happen if no one else has the wax to do it!”
There was a grumbling rumble among the council.
Councilor Eduardo Greep stood and pointed a finger straight up into the air. “I for one am tired of outsiders bothering us. We have more important things to consider. We have important work to do. A revolution doesn’t happen overnight! I say we beat the hell out of her and leave her in a ditch.”
Stella Spaceport leaned forward in her place. “Mr. Greep, that seems a bit drastic.”
He threw his plastic arms in the air. “Fine! But can we at least just go watch her sleep?”
Lillian Hampton felt a presence and stirred in the sheets. Her sleep in the strange place was restless and full of cracked dreams. Her hand rested against something out of place, it was like skin but cold and hard. She heard wedding bells in her head. Then she felt something move and there was a pressure upon her, a weight. Her eyes flickered into focus, and someone was inches from her face. “Hi there,” came the voice. Lillian screamed and bucked and leapt out of the bed. And then she saw him there in the bed, naked plastic and with a smile stretched across his fake face. “What’s the matter?” Troy Brisbane the mannequin councilor wanted to know. “Don’t you think I’m sexy?” Lillian screamed again and rushed for the light switch at the wall.
The room illuminated and then she saw that it wasn’t just Troy Brisbane in the bed, the room was occupied by the entirety of the Council of Mannequins, and then coming toward her with a grin of his own, Crazy Brady.
Lillian went to pull the door open, but Brady slammed a wide hand against it and forced it shut against her will. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. My friends here are looking for a good time and we need you to stay.”
She hurled a fist in his direction, but he gripped her by the wrist and spun her around, pinning her arm behind her back. Brady hissed like a rabid porcupine. “Now listen. I am strong and you are weak. Got it?”
Lillian scanned the room. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing—mannequins come to life and holding her captive—“What do you want from me?” she whimpered.
Pencil thin and eyeglassed Councilor Eduardo Greep stepped forward and touched her face with his dead hand. “We want your respect, we want your loyalty, we want your warm, moist love.”
“Love? I could never love a mannequin!” she snapped. Then she screamed again, and Brady tightened his grip on her.
“We want to mate with you!” Rough around the edges Councilor Karl Capshaw cried out as he jumped up and down like a lunatic. “Won’t be any babies, but there sure will be some noise!”
“Cool your jets, Karl,” Sharp-shooting Councilor Adam Eve said. “But it’s obvious we need to put her out. Bring me the Huff ‘n’ Puff cloth with the magic juice on it.”
Stella Spaceport stood at the ready and handed him what he asked for. Adam Eve held Lillian’s bony jaw with one hand, and then with the other, he smothered her mouth and nose with the cloth until her eyelids came down over her glazzies and her body went limp.
It was incredibly hot as Lillian’s car broke past the city limits line of Phoenix, Arizona. Councilor Adam Eve drove, Troy Brisbane sat in the front passenger seat, dirty Karl Capshaw, Crazy Brady, and Stella Spaceport filled the back seat. Lillian Hampton was gagged and bound in the trunk, her eyes wide and crazy with fear, the sweat beading on her face.
“You did a good job on this car, Brady,” Adam said. “It drives like a dream.”
Karl was restless in his seat. “You should have let me put it in her tailpipe,” he laughed. “Why didn’t you, huh? She was still okay to take it.”
“Shut up, Karl,” Troy said, and then to the others, “Why did we bring him?”
“Because I don’t trust him enough to be alone at the house,” Brady said. “Now, you have that church punched into the GPS?”
“I got it, I got it,” Adam answered, and he tapped at his fake plastic head. “I may be a mannequin, but I’m not stupid.”
When they arrived at the Church of the Great Alabaster God, a white torpedic building that reached high into the sky with great stained-glass motifs of universal love, they quickly jumped out of the car and scrambled to the trunk. They opened it and Lillian, always the screamer, screamed through her gag cloth.
“Hurry up and get her out of there,” Brady ordered. “Quick now before someone sees.”
Karl and Adam lifted her out and carried her toward the front of the church. They laid her down on the cement walkway. She wriggled like a worm. Karl kicked her in the side and then leaned down near to her face. “You should have been nicer to me,” he said to her.
They all got back in the car and as they drove away and left her there, the front doors of the church suddenly burst open, and the wedding parade emerged, and the celebratory rice flew high into the air, the grains coming down atop her like rain. Lillian rolled and watched as a crowd quickly gathered around her, and the eyes that looked down upon her were no longer real.
A long morning yawns its mallow yellow yawn out there on the grass where the trees and the heart live, out there where the mad heat melts the orgy moon and capsizing starships. It was a day where I felt my guts reeling in agony and worry. I had been at the hip girl’s room and holding her in the sheets while she fell asleep to the baa baa of the sheep dream king.
And I rise up to make the world uncomfortable, I rise up to make the sane seem insane. I make candles and wax them, I bathe babies and attach them to mothers, I rain God a Zippo, strike fire to the fear of the streets, the piccadilly rhombus all nonsense… Like gravy in a gravity-free orbital freefall.
A heartbeat knocks at the door, a witch rises up through the floor, mad Cigarette Sally on her haunches bellowing Bible songs, fellow longs, golden gongs, monks pray to bluebirds in the clouds, aloud, all around. Peace and tranquility for the turtles, the myrtle creeps, someone pens a letter to a lemon. A lemon has its rind broken.
He looks at her lips in the golden break of afternoon day and he thinks of all the words she forms and the ideas she has and all the good heartfelt notions and the crazy thoughts that make her so special.
A tight piece of comatose ass rested in the closet of his mind. She was in dark green work pants and a black top—short-sleeved and revealing the pale softness of her arms—and her wavy cornsilk hair was wet and dangling like restlessness.
And here I am, a scattering of thoughts, a pyramid of jingles and jangles all up in this red head of mine. I eat blueberry pie on medicine street and the medicine man says I have a million miles of corded, tangled thoughts and he just don’t have a cure, man, ‘cept listen to some ambient cyberpunk stream, sit by a real stream, dream, languid row oars on the river Middle Time, think of high grasses wavering in the breeze of another sun and soak, another moon and dive, another starlight far right gong show, the amber ass clown in cuffs. Justice for dessert lies vivid in the sun beneath the lid of a cake holder, key holder, bra holder… Get ready to bend over and get it like you’ve given it.
Milk and minstrels flow down Nickel Lane as the barbarians wait on the hill, flags of war unfurled, girls of prey uncurled, thoughts all in a bucket, sometimes just say ‘fuck it’ and the eyes bounce this way and that way… A cold creek makes a menacing sound at high noon. Meditation insists peace. The hounds of dawn wake the world, a skunk and her two little skunklings waltz up the road where we live. It’s a warm day full of sun and green. I can’t seem to lean into something that isn’t mass unfocus and restlessness.
I went to Athens and wandered through the ruins and listened to the stark larks whispering their songs in the olive trees. I shuffled through the bustling streets, the heavy air, the smell of strange food burned in my face. “I need experiences if I’m ever going to be any good,” I thought aloud to an ancient wall. I turned to look at the details in the sunbeam. I went to the plaza with the big black box and the turning tide of people. There was a man made of rope and he was dressed in black and red. He was waving his arms in the air and chanting some ancient chant of the sea. I looked up to a hotel window and saw a lamp burning. I thought of soft furniture and peace and liquid drink of the mesmerizing type. I thought of creating my own periodical and I would call it The Vespertine Lamp… Despite the sun.
I went into the hotel lobby and ordered up a room. I wanted something dim and cool and with a view of the plaza or the Saronic Gulf. I got checked in and made my way through the lingering tourist crowds and up to my room. I clicked on the jibber jabber box and went to take a shower. The soap smelled like salt and clean men from the sea. Afterward I wanted to tilt and so loaded a bowl with some high-grade Colorado herb and smoked. It’s so strange to be so high in such a foreign and grandiose place. Nothing is familiar, there is no reference point for anything. “Oh, yes this. Oh, yes that.” None twat for a measure. Hypodermic consciousness, laughing gas, permanent waves of perception now twisted like taffy. I went to look out the window and I felt as if I were on another planet, not some cumbersome rock in the Milky, but some far away place, far from the missteps of man, far from the land of aching hearts and unpolished souls, far from the meandering senseless megalithic maniacs and their war machines.
“We do not kill each other here,” someone in the room whispered, but no one was there.
I went to recline in the bed and read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow until I grew sleepy. I got back up to look out the window and this time it was night. The stars roared overhead like liquid electric bastard lanterns. I bucked my hips and impregnated the galaxy. I bid farewell to the world and curled up beneath the satin sheets and slept long and coldly, the dreams coming like liquid flashes, the long dawn waiting on the precipice.
John Horatio Smith was an odd man. He sold top hats in the men’s boutique down the street. The street that streamed near Jack Kerouac’s grave. He sold top hats to idiots, to henchman, to rich and bolshy bastards eating wet cigars for an afternoon snack. John loved his work. No, he really hated it. Hated it so much that he had devised a plan for revenge on the cards he drew. He was going to place a bomb inside one of the top hats in the shoppe. A wee little bomb, but one that had incredible destructive force.
John Horatio Smith pet a stray cat lollygagging in the alley behind the shoppe as he aggravated his cancerous condition with yet another cigarette. He tilted his hand too much to the right and the tip of his cigarette went right into the cat’s eye. The thing screeched an unrelenting feline screech and John H. Smith jumped back. He felt terrible. The cat patted at its burning eye with his paw. It cried painfully. John H. Smith just laughed. He laughed with the power of a communal jeer at a Super Bowl game.
He couldn’t help it because he was so damn odd. The cat stopped pawing and looked up at John. The cat seem shocked and amazed by John H. Smith’s humorous candor. “When I die,” the cat began. “I want to be cremated. Just burn me up, I want to be ash.”
John H. Smith looked around before he spoke. “What?” The cat was frustrated. “Don’t you know if you stick a lit cigarette in a cat’s eye you are obligated to take me on as your number one pet.” “But I don’t want a pet. I couldn’t feed you.” “Hey,” the cat smiled, “I’ll just have some cereal.”
John picked the cat up and carried it back inside the shoppe. He set the cat down on the counter and it crawled into a tipped-over top hat and fell asleep. “Hey!” John H. Smith blurted out to a huge audience of numb shoppers and co-workers, “Look! It’s a Cat in the Top Hat!” An old lady bent over the counter and peered into the hat. “By golly! He’s right!” she exclaimed. “Come have a look at this then,” she said to her friend resting in a rocking chair by a window. “No …” the friend waved her hand in disinterest, “Don’t want to.” “Oh come on then! It really is a cat in this here top hat!” The excited woman poked her face into the cavernous top hat and suddenly jumped back and screamed. “The bloody thing nearly took me eye out!” she bellowed as she frantically covered her socket with a now red hand. She stumbled back screaming and fell to the floor. John H. Smith jumped over the counter with a warm, wet towel and hurriedly placed it upon her wound. “I’m going to call an ambuli!” he hollered, “A big bolshy one with Herculean lights of red and fire in the headlights.” John Horatio Smith picked up the phone and dangerously dialed for help.
As John H. Smith walked home at 6 clutching a warm bag of bread, he stared at the sidewalk and thought of the poor old women all injured like that with only one eye. He tried to choke down the visions of her being loaded into the ambulance and the whole time she was bellowing like mad and her clothes were covered in the red red flow of her injury. John Smith tried to shake it out of his head as he turned the key to his flat and went inside. He threw the bag of bread on the couch and quickly tugged at his tie to tear it off him. “This noose will choke the life out of me!” he screamed at the walls as he continued to strip down to his underwear. He turned off all the lights, switched the stereo on full blast to Hotel Hobbies and divided himself pole to pole all over the black dance floor.
It was 2 a.m. when the dancing stopped. John H. Smith drew a deep breath and ate cottage cheese within the glow of the refrigerator light. The sweat poured down his body; dripped into the creamed, white spoon. Then, there was a knock at the door. John Smith’s pale heart began to thump in his chest. He turned his head to look at the clock on the kitchen wall. “It’s past 2 a.m. … Who the hell could that be?”
John set the cottage cheese down and tiptoed toward the door. The knock came again, only this time, it was more frantic. “Who is it?” John H. Smith yelled through the wooden door. “It’s Sherbert.” “Who?” “Sherbert!” “Who the hell is Sherbert and what brings you around my abode this time of night. What business do you have here, eh?” “I’m looking for Carina.” “Carina? Who’s Carina? I don’t know any bloody Carinas. Now bug off before I call the police.” “All right then. Excuse the intrusion sir. I must have the wrong house then, eh? Sorry to have disturbed you mister. I’ll be on my way now.” John H. Smith put his ear to the door and listened to the footsteps shuffle away. He sighed deeply and leaned the whole of his weight against the door. Then, the phone rang. “What the hell is this?!” John H. Smith picked up the receiver. “Hello?” “_____________________________” “Who the bloody hell is this?!” There was a click, then a dial tone. John H. Smith slammed the phone down.
When John Horatio Smith awoke the next morning, there was something furry with fury curled up on his stomach. Toast was burning in a distant dream. John H. Smith realized he was caught in the whirlwind of life.
After a shower and shave, John Smith walked to work. He wondered if he had killed the thing well enough. He stopped suddenly and stood stone still looking at the ground. He stayed that way for eight days and no one paid him a dime of attention.
When John Horatio Smith returned to reality it was snowing. He shook off the cold flakes and continued walking linear north, to the shoppe of top hats where he was immediately terminated for unexcused absences. “But mister, I was frozen in time, right down the street. It’s a bloody good and honest excuse sir.” The shopkeeper waved him off into the cold and John H. Smith stood there, in front of the shoppe window, glaring at the warm comfort of a job he had come to despise but kept him fed and sheltered. He spat on the glass and walked home with his hands tucked deeply in his pockets and his head tilted toward the frozen ball of white in the sky he called the sun.
“Piss off!” John H. Smith screamed through the wall at his neighbor who was wailing on the harmonica like a bastion of mad devils feeding on endless time. He picked up his favorite vase, green glass with lots of sparkles, and he hurled it against the wall. The vase shattered explosively, and John H. Smith pushed his head forward to kiss the shards of glass whizzing by his face. It was all slow-motion madness with a pinch of solidified holy grace.
When he calmed down and clicked the light on which illuminated the oval mirror in his mahogany, steamy bathroom, he stared deep into the rivers of red that were flowing down his face, frantically searching for the Gulf of Mexico. He curled his fingers gruesomely at either side of his face and screamed louder than he had ever screamed; looking at the triangular, rhombusical, trapezoidal kaleidoscope of tiny green mirrors stuck in his face like glossy spaceships that just crash landed and steamed in the epidermis of John Horatio Smith.
A daddy long legs scuttled across his forehead as he lay naked and breathing heavily upon his bed. He had a white cloth draped across his face. Cold, wet cloth. He slapped at the spider and felt it momentarily brush against his fingers before it was catapulted into the great void that surrounded them. Satisfied that he was clean of all multi-legged creatures, John H. Smith got to the business of sleeping.
John Horatio Smith resented the noose around his neck. It was a tie that bound too tightly. It was the ignorance of bliss. The hammock that never swayed. The pendulum frozen in the body of a dead grandfather. John H. Smith’s eyes opened widely, and he stared at the ceiling for a long time. A whisper of new-day light sprinkled through the thin, torn curtains and splashed upon his already warm belly. He tried to wipe the glow away, but it did not move, simply wavered a bit and then went back to its stronghold on his body.
There was an explosion, outside somewhere, and John H. Smith leapt up with a ragin’ heart and smoke bunnies in his eyes. He tore the curtains aside and peered out, straining to see where the blast came from … And then he noticed the cloud of smoke filtering up through the clouds. The building across the street was a spire of blackened rubble and mist; the screams were wafting their way up to his head, strong screams of fear amidst the rabble of darting folks ducking for cover.
If I was the man on the moon, I would fly to Mars just to know your love, thought John Horatio Smith, as he watched the mass ascension of firemen and police and Doctor of Law. They cradled the text in the basket that was their arms. The steam and hiss of death curled away from the object of destruction and made its way up to the pearly eyes of John H. Smith … He did not cry, for he could cry no longer. He threw on a Sting CD and began wandering around his home like a lost sheep. He was baking bread and thinking of time. How much time had slipped through his fingers. He destroyed his heart and soul daily just to feel nothing. John H. Smith was close to complete breakdown, but no one cared, and John H. Smith knew it; he was no longer afraid of death, for Sting knew the way to eternity.
His bread was still wet in the oven; the smell was beginning to be birthed about in his place—his flat, his condo, his home in the cemetery called STREET. And John H. Smith asked for advice from his soul: will I ever be loved again? Will the volleyball break my head, could she be any closer? Those shorts my dear, they are beautiful on you. Magic. Do you ever wonder if you are magic, beautiful, desolate, hurting, afraid or full of joy. What are you? What are you, beautiful woman? Love me beautiful woman… Just love me before I vanish. Vanish to the sea of all my dreams… Every scene of paradise with you as the main character in the play illuminating my heart.
John H. Smith rode his bike to the other side of the wicked town. The gray day was polished just right. The leaves were silver pallets of wind as they whipped past him through the slipstream of his vision. The air grew cooler as he came to the desolate end of it all; a great blockade steaming and weaving through the wonder of it all. Train tracks that never end, sailing ships that never dock, spaceships that never land… It was all there on the very edge of his life, his strife, as the angel in the clouds kissed away the simmering pain of all his bee stings.
He missed the glowing passion of her eyes, the love he saw, the glistening tears of all her caring. And as he stood and looked over the whispering, windy edge, he longed so deeply to be near her, to feel her, to smell the scent of her in his restless dreams… He wanted to love her again, only her and always her and his heart throbbed from the ache of it all, for her shadow was but just that: a shadow; a spiked memory constantly telephoning the empty room in his head, the vacant stare in his beating heart, the incessant lump in his throat when he thought of her fingers, her hair, her lips, her passion in the dark.
John H. Smith was lunching in the Dead-End Café… The windows were large and full of warm sun and cold grease and views of the edge of the world, the drop off point. John H. Smith sipped on oily, black coffee and read a newspaper, but all the pages were blank, and John H. Smith filled in every box with pictures of her—pictures of her in a brown wedding gown clutching a bouquet of green roses and smiling as if she were now truly happy without him.
John H. Smith never stopped to wonder why he was here. He sank as he looked around at the shiny hall that was the Dead-End Cafe. A breeze from the ocean whirled in through a waltzing screen door. The fan blades on the ceiling turned so slowly, and the light was lemon… Bright and sour. John H. Smith couldn’t swallow all his regrets any longer and he bowed his head upon the table and began to cry it all out. A river steaming with every bead of sorrow in his aching soul. And still the screen door waltzed, the hall was empty, and the ocean stretched out for endless miles.
John H. Smith had no more promises to make. His soul was reckless, his mind was a corner in the white ceiling—compressed experiences that made him bloated and fearful and wishing to escape. He felt so out of place as the pace of time dragged its feet through the mud in the sky, the shiny wax on the floor, the floodlights illuminating his circle of space, all the satellites spun around him, zapped him with illusions and delusions of what his life meant. The lines were all cracked and fuzzy, incoherent and John Horatio Smith wished for another dream, another goal, another life.
When he went to pay his bill, the waitress smiled and pushed the money back into his cold hands and she told him: the last drop is always free.
Her cactus bed smelled like butter nectar. She swears that lying down on the thorns helps her back, yet all the red marks there on her skin, looks like she was nearly eaten alive by fire ants.
Fire ants. She remembers the hot summer day when she was maybe 12 and she was playing in a field in Colorado with the boy who lived next door. He was a year or two older and she liked him, so she didn’t mind playing in a hot, thorny field in Colorado.
The fire ants build great volcano looking mounds and they were streaming in and out of the top of them like an army. The boy thought it would be fine and fun to destroy their mounds. He gripped big stones and hurled them at the ants. The sand and dirt splattered like a bomb hit. The ants grew angry, and their movements sped up as if someone pressed a button… And then the bites came, all over her legs, his legs. The pain made her cry, and she was embarrassed, and she ran home.
Her mother was upset that she had gotten bit by the ants while playing with the cute boy next door. She made her stay inside and so she sat near the window and watched him play football with her brothers in the long yard between their houses. When she knew he saw her there, she smiled and made kissy faces at him.
Then her mother came up behind her with a thin stick cut from a lilac bush and in a threatening way she tapped the stick against her motherly palm, and she said, “I don’t want you around that boy. He has problems and will be nothing but trouble for you.”
The girl looked up at her mother. “What problems? He doesn’t have problems. He’s just a boy.”
“He’s not just a boy,” the mother sternly answered. “He’s a dweller in the darkness.”
And perhaps he was, for just the other day he had been out in his front yard wrestling with one of the neighbor boys who lived around the corner and up the hill that led to the foothills. It was supposed to just be a fun thing, but the troubled boy took it too personally and started punching the other in the ribs as hard as he could. When the meeker boy was breathless and writhing on the ground, the troubled boy cut a green spear from a Spanish bayonet plant growing at the edge of the yard and proceeded to stab him in the stomach with the sharp point.
The boy started crying out in pain and that’s when the troubled boy’s mother came bounding out of the house yelling at him to stop. She yanked him aside and berated him in front of the other kids gathered there in the yard. She shook him as she screamed at him, “What are you doing!? You’re hurting him! Stop it! Stop it you crazy child!”
He pulled away from her and grinned. He couldn’t help it. “We were just playing,” he said.
“Stabbing is not playing,” the mother corrected him. “Get in the house!”
As he walked away, he turned and saw that his mother had knelt near the boy he stabbed with the Spanish bayonet, and she was caring for him. She was caring for him, this weak boy, this new boy, this stranger boy. She was caring for him more than she had ever cared for him. Maybe that’s why he was crazy and reckless and dangerous and unstable.
The girl’s name was Linda, and she was Middle Eastern in a way and so her parents were strict. The boy’s name was Coal, but not the normal Cole, Coal like the earthly material. They decided to meet one day in the Netherlands, not the country but a place beyond the new neighborhood that was pressed up against the foothills of the green Rocky Mountains, a place undeveloped and open. There was a strip of forest that was dissected by a cold mountain creek, and there was a trail that ran along the creek and the trail meandered far and deep until it ran up against the very base of the mountains.
It was in these Netherlands that the outsiders would escape to. It was in these Netherlands that Linda and Coal decided to go to together. They walked side-by-side. She reached out to hold his hand. He held it loosely. She stopped and turned to look at him. “Do you want to kiss me?”
He moved quickly and did it. The he turned his attention back to the exploration. “That’s the reason for all life in the world, human life, I mean.”
“What is?” she asked.
“That kiss… A kiss like that is the start of everything for humanity and beyond. Just look around at the world and everyone you see walking or talking or falling down. It’s all because of a kiss.” He picked up a rock and tossed it. They heard it smack against the trunk of a tall pine.
Her heart smiled at the sound of his words. She thought he was everything. “But it takes more than a kiss,” she said.
He stopped and looked at her. “But not today. I want to remember that kiss just the way it happened. Nothing more and nothing less. So, leave it at that.”
“Okay,” she smiled. “I’ll leave it at that.”
“Until I say different… But let’s make a fire. I like to look into the flames. I like to look through the little Russian black doors.”
“What do you see on the other side of those doors?”
“Most of the time I see nothing but more flames. I think that it means that life means nothing to me.”
“How can life mean nothing to you?” she asked as she followed his lead and picked up twigs and set them in a pile. Then she helped him gather stones to make a fire ring.
Coal looked down at the gathering of stones once it was a complete circle. He assembled the sticks inside, laid out the kindling below, set fire to it with a yellow cigarette lighter. The flames attacked the dry wood. There was crackling and smoke and the smell of a campfire.
They sat down on the ground around it. Coal seemed mesmerized. Linda watched him. “What do you see now?”
“I see a future fraught with upheaval… You may want to do yourself a favor and step away from me.”
“My mom says you’re a ‘dweller in the darkness.’”
“She’s not wrong.” Coal turned away from looking at the flames and fixed his eyes on her. “That’s why my name is Coal,” and he spelled it out loud, “C-O-A-L. But that was my doing, not my mother or father’s. I mean, the name and the darkness… Is it true that your family are terrorists?”
“No!”
“Because everyone at school says your family is from Iran and that you are all terrorists. Your brother, at least, seems like a terrorist to me.”
“He’s not a terrorist. None of us are. People are so stupid. We lived over there because of my dad’s job. That’s where he met my mom. So yeah, I’m part Iranian but I’m not a terrorist. Small minds…”
“Do you want to get high and go listen to Rush in my bedroom?”
“I’ve never gotten high. What’s it like?”
“It’s weird. Hard to explain. But everything changes. Perception changes, sound changes, time changes. I want to see what it’s like to kiss you when I’m high.”
She was intrigued by that idea. “Are you sure I won’t go crazy?”
“I can’t promise you that.”
“Are we ever going to be more than this?”
He ignored her question as he worked to douse the fire with dirt.
“Are we?”
Years later, Linda sat on the edge of her cactus bed and blinked her eyes and took a breath. “What am I doing with my life? What are any of us doing with our lives?”
CEREAL AFTER SEX 