29:
by Joe Kletz
There are 346 holes in the tile in the ceiling directly above my head. The next one has 283. It’d be easier to count them if they were all uniform, and I could utilize high school Algebra. There is no X, and I have no idea what Y is. I spend too much time staring at the ceiling. The television is on but the holes are more interesting. The glow from the box is warmth, and the noise is company. Soon I’ll be unable to count anymore, as I slip deeper into my alcoholic state. I won’t eat dinner again tonight. I’ll drink several beers and lay on the couch and resume count. Will I be productive? When? I can’t spend all night counting though. It’s past midnight and must be up early tomorrow to ride the train to the metropolis for my appointment. Five days a week I go there. Meeting the professionals who spend a minimum of eight hours (often 10, occasionally 12 or more) on their surgery. Delicate and experimental, they perform. Bit by bit, the routine surgery goes according to their plans. Every day, they remove more of my soul, more of my dream, and replace them with artificial limbs like worthlessness and inferiority. I fight the process with tooth and nail, but secede in favor of meager salary and promises of “growth”.
“One day you will make it.”
Perhaps then I’ll forgo my need to count tiles, fall into a stupor, and wonder at the idea that our calendar system is wrong and that every day is April first. And I am the fool.
27:
Dad told me once that when he and Mom went hunting for fire agates
With their rock hound friends, Mom would not hunt with the rest,
But would walk alone beside the old dirt roads,
Looking for bits of old glass.
I asked him why she did this and he said he didn’t know.
At first I thought that he did not care about it,
But then I saw that he still keeps a bucketful of her old glass,
purple with with age and sun.
I think she looked for glass because she loves us.
It is her mystery.
Now she is ripe with love and mystery and sleep,
Beyond passion.
Look around you at the family; she loves us and affirms us still.
God made her sweet,
Plumbed for children,
Tough and fibrous, watchful of her family,
Which wings around her now like birds
Flocking in unison at her command,
Obedient, tranquil, charmed.
We revel in the wake of her passing
Because she loves us in her sleep,
Because God made her that way.
(March 27, 2001)
21:
Patrick sat down at his desk with the intention of getting some work done, but spent the first few minutes swatting the bugs that had been attracted to one of the plants in his office. His in-box, usually a haven for documents only requiring his signature, had accumulated a large sum of odd shaped envelopes with only the words ‘private’ and ‘confidential’ scrawled across the surface in smeared green ink. It appeared as if it had been written by a drunken four-year-old with a broken pen. There were twenty-five or thirty of them, stacked neatly on top. Maureen had been on vacation all week, so Patrick had taken on his own secretarial tasks. No one had access into his office except for the overnight janitor, who doesn’t come in very often anyway.
He wondered where the hell these came from, and assumed this paranoia was due to his recent occurrences of chronic memory loss. ‘Did someone hand them to me, or were they just placed here?’ he wondered. After staring at the lush array office plants which he prided himself on taking so much care of, he opened the first envelope. Empty. The second, also empty. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, all empty. Eventually he opened one containing a colorful assortment of perforated paper, multi-colored and with various designs and a bit wet. He didn’t know what to make of it. ‘Why has someone left these strange envelopes in my office?’ he wondered, as he flipped through the small square sheets contained in the envelope. He opened the next, and it was empty like the first several. He stopped and lit a cigarette while taking a call from a client. He though for a moment and resumed opening the envelopes. After another series of empty ones, he came across one which wasn’t sealed– in fact, it had been sealed, but reopened. Inside was a note, in his own handwriting, explaining to the reader that whoever opens the rest of the envelopes will have eternal life. ‘Eternal life?’ he thought, ‘did I write this, what the hell is going on here?’
Patrick left his office in a frenzy and began walking down the hallway to the elevators. It was only 9:30 in the morning, and he usually never left his office until noon, and on many days worked straight through lunch. When he got to the corridor where the elevators were, he pressed the ‘down’ button and awaited the next available one. He needed some fresh air, and had to go downstairs and outside because the floor’s balcony was under construction. When the elevator came, he stepped inside. The doors closed, but instead of running down to the ground floor it began to speed upward, eventually to the top floor, the eightieth, nine floors above his own. He knew they had been working on these elevators since one had dropped thirty-nine floors killing all six people inside it just three weeks ago. Realizing this, he exited on the top floor and decided to take the stairs back to his own floor. On his way to the stairs, he thought about how strange it was that everyone was staring at him as if he didn’t belong there. ‘These people know me, don’t they?’ he wondered. He knew most of them from sharing elevators or tables in the building’s cafe over lunch, but today they looked at him like he was an intruder. Many people got out of his way or stared at him with a look of horror.
Entering the stairwell he tripped over a large obstruction. Stumbling, Patrick looked down and noticed a woman’s body slumped over onto the stairs. Her ears and nose had been cut off and there was blood all over the floor. She was dead. ‘Jesus,’ he said out loud while loosening his tie, ‘what happened?’ He quickly turned back onto the top floor to alert someone of the circumstances. No one was there. Everyone was gone, and all of the overhead lights had been turned off. It was now dark outside, and none of this made any sense; the only light came from the illuminated exit sign above the stairwell door, and some from the security lights near a fire extinguisher. He had seen at least thirty people working and conducting business not thirty seconds ago. Confused, bewildered, his eyes began to adjust to the darkness as he felt his way around looking for a phone.
A cluttered desk nearby, with a phone cord running from it attracted his attention. He felt up the cord until he found the phone, and picked it up, dialing 911.
A laughing emergency operator asked him why he was calling, and he explained that there was a dead woman in the stairwell of his building and everyone was gone. He said it was all dark and he was confused and suffering from amnesia of sorts, and that he didn’t know what to do. Patrick was instructed to walk into the stairwell and sit on the corpse, so no one who might be passing through would steal it or eat it. ‘What the hell do you want me to do?’ he exclaimed, ‘There has been a murder and everything is askew!’ ‘Don’t worry about it Patrick’ the operator said, ‘we’ll all be out of your way soon.’ ‘How did you know my name?’ he asked her. ‘We all know what you’re up to Patrick, you don’t have to hide anything from us’ ‘Hide anything? What are you talking about? Who is this?!’ He slammed the phone down.
Standing in the subtle light he wiped the accumulation of perspiration off his forehead and removed his tie. He stepped into the light near the fire extinguisher and glared at his reflection on the surface of the glass case holding the red tank and fire axe. He was scared and angry, and punched the glass, causing it to shatter and fall to the ground. He pivoted around to size up the room and any other possible escape routes only to slip on the floor, falling on his ass, which was now soaked in blood. It wasn’t stagnant blood, either, in fact, it appeared to be flowing, not from the stairwell, but from all around him. He panicked, and scrambled to his feet.
It was hot, probably about 110 degrees. He ran to the windows looking for a fire escape that he was sure didn’t exist, but nonetheless, and saw before him outside the thick panes of glass not the medium-sized metropolis he was used to seeing and living in every day of his life but instead a vast green expanse, with beautiful grass, pristine brick roads, and sparkling rivers and ponds. There was a waterfall, and a large orb too big to be the moon, but with the same features. He realized he was hallucinating and gathered himself enough to remember his unfortunate circumstances. He ran to the stairwell, stepping clumsily over the fetid corpse, and galloped down the stairs.
He was sweating bullets and caked in blood. His ears were ringing and his jaw was tight. The stairs were wobbling and his balance was off severely. ‘There’s no time for me to worry about my condition’ he was able to rationalize, ‘I’ve just got to get back to my office and open those other damn envelopes.’ Patrick was surely not rational, wanting to get back and open envelopes instead of getting out of the building and seeking help, but he did so anyway. The lights on his floor had not been turned off, but this floor was also empty. When he entered his office, all of the plants had died. They smelled of urine. It was much cooler in his office than on the eightieth floor, so he sat down at his desk and stared at the unopened stack.
The ceiling fan caused the miscellaneous papers on his desk to flutter in the steady breeze, and he spaced out briefly on the hypnotic oscillations of the rotating blades of the fan. A moment of clarity occurred, and he tried desperately to understand what was going on. He couldn’t grasp his current state, and chose to escape into his consciousness for a moment again while watching a friendly lady bug crawl across his desk. He remembered hearing about the symbol of black dots on the red back of an insect such as this represented death. He crushed the bug and gobbled it up.
There were seven envelopes left in his box and he picked up the first one. It was empty. The next was also, and the next. There were now two left and the first had a note in it, also in his own style, telling him to take the last envelope into the mop closet down the hall to open it, for no apparent reason. The final envelope he held in his hands and he could tell it had some mass to it. It seemed dense and heavy, as if it contained some magazines, and it was long and manila.
Police responded to a call from a night janitor at the building at about 3:30 in the morning who had claimed that at least two floors in the building had been vandalized and possibly robbed. Upon arrival, they were lead to the top floor where they found smashed jugs of cranberry juice all down the hallway. There was broken glass everywhere and the floor was sticky. A telephone was off the hook with bloody fingerprints on the receiver and on the keypad. The stairwell door was propped open by the branch of a decorative palm tree uprooted from it’s pot three feet away. The fire axe, removed from it’s broken glass case, was lodged into the heart of the palm. It had been hacked three times.
As the police made their way to the seventy-first floor, they followed the steps and the trail of sticky juice into the office of Patrick Summers, the company’s Vice-President. The blinds on the windows were torn down, the desk was a mess, and the room smelled of stale urine. Chairs were turned over and there was a pile of opened mail on the desktop. They heard a strange whimpering sound coming from the janitor’s mop closet a few doors down. Upon opening the door, they found a naked man lying in a fetal position with bloody knuckles, mumbling about everything from comedic 911 operators to the strange city of which he was now a new resident. His wet and sticky clothes were in a pile in the mop sink and there was a stack of pornographic magazines protruding from a manila envelope.
He was incoherent and babbling, so they threw a blanket over him and helped him into the hallway to lay down on a couch. Meanwhile, other officers had arrived and were collecting an enormous quantity of LSD from the desk of the trashed office.
Patrick Summers was taken by ambulance to a hospital and treated for minor cuts and bruises and dehydration, and administered a healthy dosage of Thorzine for the psychotic state which was apparent. Waking after 22 hours of uninterrupted sleep, he was informed that the janitor in his building was in custody for possession of over 9,000 hits of blotter acid. The janitor had hidden his stash in the Vice-President’s office overnight along with some personal items, including pornographic magazines and several envelopes he planned to use to distribute his acid to his own clients. He failed to retrieve them before Patrick came to work that day, confusing his office with another man’s next door who was due to be out of town for the next week.
Patrick realized that he had handled an obscene amount of fresh acid and it had been absorbed by his sweaty hands. He had tripped all day long in his office, and when everyone left for the day had wandered aimlessly around the top floor and trashed things, including the palm tree, the fire case, the stairwell, and eventually his office, and urinated in his plants. He was suffering from severe hallucinations, both visual and auditory, and followed a list of instructions written by himself in his unusual state. He became violent and undressed in the mop closet because his clothes were soaked with the sweat of a terrified person. He eventually recovered a week later and went back to work.
21:
Finally, The Doctor emerged from the back, scraping a mystery substance clean from underneath his worn and jagged claws. He merely glanced in my direction and paused for a moment, fixing his pinned pupils (the result of excessive Dilaudid intake) upon the festering cluster of maggots which had accumulated on the remains of his half-eaten steak Tartar, which was the doc’s favorite lunchtime entree. “Sorry about the mess,” The Doc exclaimed, “but my receptionist, who’s also the janitor, quit last month and I can’t seem to find any competent applicants.”
“No problem,” I told him.
“Are you interested in my visceral work, or are you applying for the position?” “Uh… I’ve got some sketches here somewhere…” I reached into the side pocket of my shoulder bag, and suddenly produced a few rough drawings for the doctor. “Here you go. I’d like this one, right on my heart.” “I see,” said The Doc, seemingly impressed with my courage, or surprised at my stupidity. “We’ll have to begin right away. I have prior engagements to attend to in a few hours. Please lie down in there and I’ll be in with the anesthetic in a moment.” He pointed towards the door which he had recently emerged. Hesitantly, I stepped through the threshold into a surprisingly clean and organized room, with the exception of a single used syringe laying in a tray on a rolling table adjacent to the doorway. I wondered if that was to be the tool used for administering my anesthesia. I hoisted myself upon the operating table, which was absent of that noisy tissue paper. He emerged again, and lunged at me with vengeance. He tore my shirt open at the buttons and began dry-shaving my chest with determination and vigor. Before it really began to burn, he had injected me with that dirty-looking needle. As I wondered what kind of anesthetic they used in Mexican visceral tattoo shops, a warm feeling overcame me. I was very conscious, but relaxed in a care-free state of total bliss. As the sawblade entered my sternum, it seemed as though the quiet buzzing was coaxing me into oblivion. What was happening? Where was I? The overhead fluorescent lights began melting into me, making me warmer and softer and fuzzier by the minute. Minutes turned into hours, and time seemed to have been non-existent, for I had lost all perception of it.
When the operation was over, or so I perceived, my vision became clear and sober, and I felt fatigued. As I looked around, to my total shock, I was in an entirely different operating room; a room not even in Mexico. I was back home in Chicago at Rush-Presbyterian, being informed by a gentle nurse that I was found collapsed in an alley of an apparent heroin overdose. “Well,” I asked, “did The Doctor finish my tattoo?” “Your tattoo?” the gentle nurse questioned with confusion. “Yes, my visceral tattoo, the one on my heart, the one–” “No, no… you don’t have any tattoos on your heart, except for the one made by the adrenaline shot administered when the paramedics got to you. You better get some rest. Buzz me if you need anything.” Then she left. I guess I dreamt the whole thing, I thought to myself, noticing the pain in my chest, and the numbness in my limbs. I’ve got to stop using dope, I told myself for the hundredth time. I them I went back to sleep.
19:
When my cousin decided to marry a Catholic, my family was horrified. Her parents tried to talk her out of it, to no avail. The wedding was in a Catholic church, of course, and on the appointed day, family and friends made the trek from my hometown to Fargo for the ceremony.
We gathered in small, uncomfortable groups in front of the wood framed building. Most of us had never been in a Catholic church before. We didn’t know what to expect. We conversed gloomily, making small talk, boring each other to death as Lutherans will.
I recalled the stories I heard when I was a child about the arsenal of weapons that the Catholics had hidden away in the basement of their churches, preparing against an attack, perhaps, or possibly a coup d’etat. Even then I doubted that there was any truth to the rumor, but growing up, I was as wary of Catholics as the rest of my Scandinavian brethren.
Catholics prayed to the Virgin Mary, for goodness sakes! How could they put a mortal woman on an equal footing with Jesus and God?
We filed into the church, escorted by ushers resplendent in their tuxedos and took our seats in the pews on the left hand side of the center aisle. The audience proved to be about equally divided between Catholics and Protestants, the former on the right, the latter on the left. The bride’s entourage gawked at the candles and statuary and eyed the Catholics suspiciously.
It was cold in the room, I noted, and I recalled hearing that the Catholics didn’t heat their churches.
We were all right until the service began, but when the group on the groom’s side began to stand and sit again and sometimes kneel at unexpected and unpredictable moments, the huddled masses on the left side of the aisle were thrown into confusion. We stood when we should be sitting and sat when we were apparently supposed to stand. Up, down, up, down. For a time, the service became a comic opera.
There was one couple sitting up front on the bride’s side that seemed to know the routine. Catholics obviously. It occurred to me that if I watched those two, I would know what to do and when to do it. The stratagem worked like a charm.
The ceremony was mercifully brief. After the vows, the organ rose in its throaty chorus of joy, the bride and groom promenaded down the aisle, and a bevy of witnesses, some grinning, some tearful, escaped into the meager sunshine of a midwestern spring day.
We milled about on the lawn for a time before the happy couple got into their car and drove off to a chorus of shouts and catcalls from the well-wishers. The newly wedded were spending their honeymoon at Big Pine Lake.
Before they left, I kissed my cousin on the cheek and shook hands with her husband. The bridegroom was a big, red-faced young man. His head was the size and shape of a bowling ball. He had a hand like a ham. I wished them both good luck.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and wandered back to the church. My father and my uncle, the bride’s father, were standing by the steps. My uncle looked spiffy in his new Hart, Schafner, and Marx suit, but he had a stricken look on his face.
“Where did I go wrong?” he asked me. What could I say? That he should have given his approval? Knowing my cousin, she would have called off the wedding if he’d done that. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make the poor man feel any better, so I didn’t say anything.
Food was served in the church basement a little later, and the company dug into the spareribs and chicken with gusto. There was jello, of course, and a bewildering assortment of home baked cookies, cakes, and pies.
On the way out, after the meal, my father’s friend Leland buttonholed me. Leland Foss was a real estate and insurance agent in my hometown. He was a fat, jovial fellow with a somewhat mixed standing in the community. He was a good Christian on Sunday, a pillar of the Lutheran church, but the rest of the week he was a businessman of the kind that gave widows and orphans nightmares. “Larceny Leland” was his nickname, although I never heard him called that in my father’s hearing.
Leland had just come out of the men’s room, and he bumped up against me and whispered into my ear. “Smells as bad in their can as it does in the one in our church,” he said. Leland clapped his hand on my shoulder and headed for the door, presumably to get some fresh air.
I don’t know if Leland thought of what he said as anything more than a joke, but to this day I consider it a profound observation.
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