September 2003 | back-issues, fiction
by jc jaress
Forty years of cigarettes had worked her face over like a metal rake and her hair that she says use to fall like golden sunshine now sits brittle and high upon this plucked and painted landscape
But she still has legs
And an ass that stumble-dances its way from barstool to barstool like a parade of horses on their way to the starting gate carrying the jocks wearing their multi-colored silks
Prancing and snorting
All stiff legged, every step working up the lather between their cheeks
But it isn’t the body that keeps her in business, no, it’s the way she carries it
Teetering on that fine line between holding your whole world in the palm of her hand as if you are the only man that she would ever know
Or falling down piss-drunk in the street
Tonight, she’s been here too long and has worn out most of her welcome
Finishing her drink, she makes a move toward the door and, fighting with the barstool over her purse, crashes to the floor in a great heap of legs and ass
God, she must’ve had great lather a few years back
July 2003 | back-issues, fiction
a short story by J Eric Miller
My old man lived off the animals. Which is to say, he was an exploiter. He used to run a trap line, and he raised chinchillas in the basement. He shot bears for the gallbladders, deer and elk for their horns, and God knows what else. Cockfights, dog fights, raccoons chained to logs and forced to fight dogs, and so on. He ran exotic birds through the house; my father and I would burn the bodies of the bulk of the birds that died in transit, and we would try to clean up those that lived. Somebody would pick them up and give my father money. Mother kept a few, her pets, and she taught them to speak. My father never liked hearing them much. Neither did I.
She got fed up after a while. Probably with all the animals and the death and the fact my father never had a real job and most of the money we had came from places ordinary people wouldn’t consider legitimate. She wanted, I think, to lead a regular life. So she left.
I was seventeen. The morning after she left, my father took her birds out and went from one to another, wringing their necks. I guess he didn’t want them bringing up memories.
Those first seventeen years were filled with blood, and suffering, and death. You’d think it was my birthright. You’d think I’d be the same as my old man. But I wasn’t. I could hear the sound of those pet birds talking, and the sound of their necks breaking. That was the end of it.
And so, like my mother, I left.
Ten years later, and I don’t eat meat. I don’t wear leather, or wool, for that matter, or silk. I don’t eat eggs and I don’t drink milk. I try not to do anything that involves the exploitation of animals. A psychologist might say that I’m overcompensating. But I like to believe that if I had grown up the regular way that my mother wanted, I would have developed these convictions anyway.
In truth, it doesn’t matter. I believe what I believe.
I am involved. I am doing what I can. Trying to slip cogs out of the machine. Trying to remember, when I feel overwhelmed, that each individual suffering is worth alleviating, even if the overall problem is not solved. Break-ins, thefts, and destruction: testing laboratories, hen batteries, fur farms. Sometimes we do more. Sometimes we do things that would make lesser people turn away. But of this I am certain: nothing will ever make me stop.
It is only that I want a break. Everybody needs a vacation sometime.
Ten years, and I haven’t seen my old man–shortly after the divorce, he moved into a cabin he owns in a Washington state forest–although I call him two or three times a year. We never really talk about anything; we just confirm that the other is alive. It’s obvious he’s gone downhill. You can hear the age in his voice. Sometimes, he doesn’t make much sense. I imagine empty cages with doors bent open; instruments, once sharp and shiny, now dull and rusted. It is important for me to believe that my father is no longer an exploiter. After all, he’d be a perfect target, even though he’s my dad.
The cabin is in a state of disrepair. And to my relief, there are no apparent victims about–no animals staked to the ground; no skins stretched on the outside walls; nothing crying out from some hidden place; nothing. There are, in fact, butterflies and hummingbirds in the air.
The old man is bent and gray. Hair hangs off his knuckles, out of his ears. He looks mean and wrinkled and when he smiles at me from the cabin door his face looks like a rubber mask. It is at once frightening and pathetic.
“What you up to, Pop?”
“I’ve got to tell you,” he says in the voice of a conspirator–and a fear runs through me–“that I’ve found particular signs. Absolute evidence. He is about…”
“Who’s about?”
“Bigfoot,” he hisses.
“What?”
“Bigfoot. He’s mine.” His eyes absolutely glow with purpose.
The relief is not as profound as you might think. In truth, I am undone by the pathos of it. I half wish that Bigfoot were, indeed, about. Even worse, I wish that my father might catch the creature so that the light–mean and stupid as it is–will not leave his eyes.
“Going to get him by God!”
The old man’s face is steady and determined now and I can no longer see the pathos. Rather, I am chilled by his intensity.
He feeds me potatoes and I ignore the bloody, store-bought meat he eats.
“You got a happy life?” he asks.
“I’m not unhappy.”
He nods and appears to think. “Me neither.”
“It’s thin line,” I say.
He looks at me. His face isn’t quite blank, but it is hard to read. I almost see a question there. I’m ready to say more. It is only through an act of will that I close my mouth and turn away.
“Let me show you something,” he says.
He lifts to the table a dirty folder full of cutouts from various magazines offering money for the live capture, or at least the dead body of, Bigfoot.
Artists’ renderings show the creature as sad-eyed and intelligent-looking, shoulders slumped as if with fatigue, with the face of a chimp, which reminds me of the faces of the many tortured, beaten and imprisoned animals I’ve seen.
“I’ll get the bastard,” my father says, but he’s no longer talking to me. He’s looking off, his head nodding and nodding, as if he has forgotten how to stop it.
I want to nudge him, maybe a bit roughly, as if he is a broken record, caught upon a skip. I rise and take my plate to the sink. My father goes to the window and stares out. Slack has drawn the wrinkles from his face. His lips are puckered, his head cocked slightly.
In the night, Bigfoot’s face comes to me sad, as it is in the drawings, but then it transforms, and I see the eyes of my father in the face of the beast, stupid and hungry. I sit up and can hear my old man breathing.
“I figgered you’d come here,” he tells me the next day.
“I’m not staying long. Just a few days.”
He smiles. “You don’t have to help me.”
“Help you what?”
He smiles even more broadly. “You don’t have to help my catch him. You can stay here anyway.”
“I didn’t come to help you.”
“I know. You came for help.”
He begins to laugh.
Each morning, he goes across an old bridge and into the forest. He carries a carefully maintained tranquilizer gun–I’ve used them myself in different circumstances–and a backpack. Hunched and hunkered, he disappears into the woods.
At night, I hear noises from the woods; they wake me from my sleep and I think about the creature. My father is always awake at these times. I find him at the window, perfectly still and focused.
When I dream at night, it is of either my old man or Bigfoot, or a combination of the two: the face is evil, then innocent; it is mean, then sad. When I wake I feel I haven’t slept at all.
I wait for my father during the day. I catch up on the reading I’ve avoided over the years. Frequently, I drift into naps–and I dream then, too. Sometimes it is of the animals I’ve helped, the ones who’d been broken so badly that their suffering could only be alleviated by death; or the thousands who are maimed, physically and psychologically, for the rest of their lives. I think of those I could not help, the ones who had to be left to their exploiters. Rarely do I dream of those animals whose rescues were accomplished cleanly.
In the day, with the weak warm sun on me, I dream, too of humans, the ones we’ve labeled evil, and the attempts to break them, their bodies and their minds.
Sometimes I wake still dreaming of the pain. Sometimes the pain of animals and humans blur into one throbbing mass. Then I snap out of it, emerging to the sound of birds, to the smell of my father, and, sometimes, to a deeper smell of some other creature in the forest. I feel watched, frightened, exposed.
The old man comes back limping. He doesn’t know to soak his feet. “Going to get him,” he says, “you bet.” He eats his bloody meat. He stares from the window.
And at night, something thrashes in the woods. Before coming here, I would have known it was only a bear or an elk or some other animal, large but identifiable. Now, I have to remind myself.
I am not sleeping enough. The dreams are following me too far into my waking. The sunlight is on my face but I can look right past it to the woods, where moss hangs like drapes in the darkness, above the stink of earth. I tell myself, get your mind straight. You’ve been weak before, many times. In every circumstance there is a moment of weakness. But weakness is something certain that a mind can overcome.
Overcome, I tell myself. Think straight. Take control. Overcome.
“Soon,” he says.
“What?”
“I’ll have him soon. You’ll see.”
I can hear the bones of my father creaking as he walks around the cabin. I ask nothing further.
I watch the old man go into the forest. He looks innocent and he looks evil. He looks sad and he looks cruel. I am not clear on other things, either: do I follow to hunt him or help him? Do I go to be hunted by him with the beast as bait or by the beast with him as bait?
There was a light rain last night and into this morning, and his recent tracks are easy to differentiate from those of previous journeys.
This forest is dark and crowded and dank. There is the drone of insects and the sound of small animals, and sometimes, a crashing sound from an animal much larger than me. My mind is clear. I tell myself to go forward, one step after the other.
I see a thin stand of aspen trees with sunshine pouring in. My father’s tracks veer off there, and I follow them. He is fifty yards in, lying at the base of a tree, his hands folded on his chest, his pack and rifle propped up beside him. Up close, I can hear his breath is long and deep. I look around. The woods are still. My father is still. I can hear his heart, or perhaps it is my own. Or perhaps it is the heartbeat of the creature. For a moment, I imagine that I am the Bigfoot my old man seeks. I imagine standing as that creature above my father, leaning down with large, black hands, and twisting without much effort the old man’s head, so that his neck snaps and it is over.
And I hear all of our hearts as that one heart.
A small black ant runs across my old man’s face. And I realize, he’s going to die, just like that, sometime soon, in peace, without really causing much more harm to the world.
April 2003 | back-issues, fiction
a fiction short by Scott Neumyer
([email]lecter323 [at] aol [dot] com[/email])
“You want to shoot some pool?” she asks as we walk past the beach, our arms brushing back and forth on the sides of our legs, the salty ocean breeze hanging over us like a thick fog. We’re coming up to the only bar in town. Her sister and brother-in-law have asked us to shoot a few racks before heading back to the house. I’m full of ice cream and not sure I can handle much more than a few minutes.
“I think I’m going to head back,” I tell her. “I’ve had it. I need to close my eyes for a few.” I grab her hand, bring it to my mouth, and kiss it quickly. Her fingers are sticky from the ice cream and it reminds me of when I was younger and more willing to shoot a few racks. “You go ahead. I’ll see you back at the house later, okay?”
“You sure?”
“Of course,” I say, although I’m not. “Have fun. Have one for me.”
“I’ll have a few,” she says as she pulls me in, kisses me, and runs off to catch up with Meg and Kevin.
I watch her and wonder if I’ve made the right decision, letting her go alone like that. I convince myself that I have and walk the half-mile to the house alone, stumble up the porch steps, and straight up the stairs to the room we’re sharing for the week.
I lie on the bed, snap my headphones onto my ears and close my eyes. One day left here and I’ve decided to listen to jazz while she shoots pool, sucks down colored drinks, and does God-knows what else. I’d say I’m depressed but I’d be lying. Scared is probably the better word.
* *
It’s late when I hear the bedroom door click open. I rub the sleep from my eyes, roll over and, strain to see her in the darkness. She slips into a pajama top and sweatpants, throws her clothes in the corner, and crawls into bed, careful not to disturb me.
“It’s late,” I say. She’s startled to hear that I’m awake and quickly pulls the blankets up to her neck.
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. We lost track of time and just kept shooting.” She rolls her head on the pillow and looks straight into my face. “You’re not mad, are you?”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m just tired.”
She kisses me lightly on the forehead and turns on her side away from me. I stare at her smooth shoulders and strong back until we’re both asleep.
* *
The following afternoon we walk along the beach and sit on some rocks facing out into the ocean. They are smooth and clean but cold, not exactly made for sitting.
We talk about possibly living together when we get home, about maybe getting married.
“But not if you’re still at that job,” she says. “It’s slowly killing you.”
“I know,” I tell her and agree that I should leave but know I never will.
We sit on the rocks for a while and talk about the chances that we’ll be together forever, until she tells me that she’s cold. I say, “I know,” and we slip our sandals back on, walk up the beach to the house, pack our things, and drive home knowing more than we’d ever known before.
[b]Author’s Notes[/b]
Scott Neumyer is a writer from New Jersey. He has written reviews and commentary for DVD Angle (www.dvdangle.com). His fiction has appeared in 3AM Magazine and is forthcoming in Snow Monkey. He is working on a collection of short stories.
March 2003 | back-issues, fiction
a fiction short by Pasha Malla
([email]pasha [at] ekno [dot] com[/email])
[b]Rm #312 – Ludwig Van Beethoven[/b]
Mr. Beethoven checked in with only one piece of luggage, a leather- bound valise. He failed to tip either the doorman, or the bell boy. In the elevator he broke wind and blamed it on a child.
During his two-night stay, Mr. Beethoven amassed a substantial bill viewing pornographic films on pay-per-view television. Evidence of semen was found in the bedsheets, wastebasket, shower and bathroom sink. Upon departure he was heard to refer to the hotel as a “shithole” and refused to offer identification while paying by personal cheque.
But in the room where Mr. Beethoven stayed sound has changed. The door opens not with a creak, but the chirping of sparrows. The bathroom taps pour a desert wind. You speak and your voice comes out thunder.
[b]Rm #801 – female novelist[/b]
A certain prolific female novelist stayed recently for one night in Room 801. The novelist, who was listed in the registry under a pseudonym, mainly kept to herself, emerging only to use the ice machine and remark how pleased she was to “have a room of (her) own”.
The novelist was pleasant, but confrontational when it came to hotel policy. However, it should be noted that while she persistently questioned the necessity of specific check-out times, no one was at any point afraid of her.
One peculiarity has emerged from the novelist’s stay: Ms. Maria Jimenez, the chambermaid assigned to Room 801, has since been unable to tell stories. Ms. Jimenez, who has worked at the Sarnia Best Western for close to a decade, and is renowned among the hotel staff for her sense of humour and intriguing tales of “the old country”, has become plagued by the worry that each anecdote she recounts will only be a version of the memory of the last time she told it.
[b]Rm #609 – Tyco Brahe[/b]
Tyco Brahe was a delightful guest. He beguiled both staff and patrons alike with lectures on the cosmos. In the sauna, he was consistently the first one up to pour water on the rocks.
Mr. Brahe spent four nights at the Sarnia Best Western. He was cordial and clean. He tipped the chambermaids generously. He allowed the children of other guests to look through his telescope. Mr. Brahe did, however, become agitated when kept up by a fornicating couple in Room 607. He resorted at 2:14 a.m. to paging the front desk the concierge, while sympathetic, felt uncomfortable intervening.
The smell Mr. Brahe has left in Room 609 is queer. It is familiar. It is the smell of your own home or rather, that specific smell of other people’s homes you never assume your own to have, but of which you become suddenly aware only after returning from a lengthy vacation.
(Story first published in [url=http://www.opiummagazine.com/storymallawestern.html]Opium Magazine[/url])
(c)2003 Pasha Malla
February 2003 | back-issues, fiction
by Rey Martinez
([email]maxinquaye [at] aol [dot] com[/email])
Whenever I thought of such a thing, only warbled service announcements pulled into my mind. Attention wddwndkjwebwejbdjw or The next train leaving the station is on Track 52738dbbe. Nothing against the MTA PA operators, but they wouldn’t be playing Vegas anytime soon.
I’d probably never even have put the two words together if it weren’t for my poorly trained Jamaican auto mechanic. See, he’d promised my car fixed by Friday, but come Friday, there I stood on the 34th Street platform waiting for the R train to take me home. Hector (don’t ask me how a Jamaican gets that name) ruined my date with a precision I could only hope would eventually benefit my car.
Although as suave as any struggling DJ in his mid-thirties, I needed more than my Metrocard that night. It was my first date with Marisol, a 22 year old go-go dancer I met while playing the Limelight last week, and I still didn’t know if she was high when she slipped me her number.
At my age, anonymous sex with hard bodies was losing its appeal, both for me and whoever was involved. But as many times as my benevolent soul of a sister explained that I would never meet anyone decent in a club, I wanted to prove her wrong.
That’s what motivated me to invite all 105 lbs. of Marisol to an outdoor bistro near Madison Square Park. This was my new method of quality controlling the possible life partners I met at various gigs.
Fortunately, Marisol remembered our date, somewhat remembered me, and didn’t expect to be picked up. I arrived early, having caught the express, and waited outside the overpriced faux country club entrance to the place. I wore my best outfit–all black, hoping the trend of black making fat look fine was still in effect.
I chain-smoked three-quarters of my Merit Ultra Slims before she arrived, and we couldn’t have been more wrong for each other. Worse than mixing classic rock with jungle, or death metal with two-step garage.
Her outfit served two purposes–gaining the attention of any living creature with an ounce of testosterone and creating a painful embarrassment that lodged itself onto my stomach, continually designing new species of fart throughout the evening.
I hope she couldn’t read my discomfort. I tried my best to look pleased even though I had no car, little money, little hair in the light, and even less confidence outside my DJ booth.
Normally this bistro would have never allowed anyone dressed/undressed in such a fashion to dine in their fine establishment, but the curves on Marisol’s petite frame put the brakes on any of their moral codes.
She still wore the piercings, the tattoos, even the body glitter I remembered. A shame that’s all she offered, like a great album cover with little more than liner notes inside.
My sister’s laughing at me somewhere, that bitch.
After a meal, where the most interesting exchanges occurred between our waiter Mike and myself, we left. I was glad I couldn’t offer Marisol a ride home. It’s not like I could lose any more points. I’d already quit playing somewhere between the first and tenth time she managed to get her tongue ring caught on her fetuccini alfredo.
The street was empty. A light summer breeze carried the sounds of a lone trumpeter from his terrace down to our ears. I tried hard to figure out what tune was playing. Miles? Count?
Marisol’s bubble gum popping broke my trance. I had to get rid of her before someone called the cops. In the harsh street lamp light, she couldn’t have been more than 17, though her body was pushing a healthy 24.
I offered her a cigarette, and nothing more. She was accustomed to much more ? drugs, sex, and the kitchen sink, maybe both on the kitchen sink for all I knew. She walked south, I walked north, and the go-go dancers and pimps of the world joined my sister in mocking me all the way to the subway.
Before that night, I hadn’t taken the subway for over 5 years or so. I continued to be surprised at how things had changed. No graffiti, new tokens, newer Metrocards, and few panhandlers. In a strange way, I missed the old subway. This new and improved cousin didn’t feel New York the same way current hip-hop jived with its New York rap roots.
My luck, the only thing constant were the delays. Waiting on the platform, I heard a strange sound. It couldn’t have been a train. It had a soothing quality trains couldn’t afford. I walked towards the sound. It was followed by another and another. Then it changed just as quickly. The pitch rose then dropped as beats flew through the hot air.
Someone was playing music or playing with my head. I studied the people sitting on the benches I passed. They either didn’t notice the music or didn’t care. I continued down the platform. Finally, I came across the culprit. A pastel green fixture attached to the space reserved for the subway directional signs.
Two kids jockeyed for positions and raised their skinny arms to touch the spaces on the fixture. Just as they touched, lights came on and sounds were played. I’d seen many things in the city, but none as bizarre or sweet.
I smiled at the kids and joined in the rhythm, touching the bar and releasing some beats. The three of us played something Africaa Bambaataa, George Clinton, and Parliament would be proud of. The music we made served no purpose, but man were we happy.
Our concert came to an abrupt end as the subway pulled into the station. People got off, some carrying packages, others emotional baggage. And as they passed us we played a few notes on the guitar of the future. A few of the people smiled in bewilderment. It must have also been their first time experiencing this odd creation.
I boarded the subway with a smile on my face, despite the lack of air-conditioning or spare seats. The two boys boarded, exchanged looks, and quickly ran off the train. Through the scratched plexiglass, I spied them tuning up for another show. My subway pulled away and the last thing I heard were the beeps and hums of the strange green instrument which seemed to me a gift from the stars.
I need to ride the subway more often. I’d have never guessed the city would have paid for something so wonderful. What’s next, 2 turntables and a microphone for ratracers to scratch and relieve stress?
The ride was smooth, or maybe I just gave it the benefit of the doubt. I had seen a little of myself in those kids. During my own childhood, I had played with spoons, drums, even my calculator to make sounds that awakened things in people. I’d figured, why play the one millionth rendition of something tired, when you can create something new.
And at the Queens Plaza station, something new boarded the subway. A pair of Mexican mariachi wielding exquisite acoustic guitars began their serenade through the subway car. These guys were amazing. They pulled off harmonies and solos as the subway jarred its way through the tunnels. Nothing fazed them. Not the Asian woman hawking trinkets. Not the Spanish guy selling dead batteries. They even did a 2 step dance in their snakeskin boots. Fellow commuters with their noses in books or their headphones blaring suddenly forgot their distractions, transfixed by a unique sound that would not be ignored.
Now, despite Ms. Farnsworth’s best efforts in grades 7-9, I still cannot utter, let alone understand, more than three syllables of Spanglish. But it didn’t matter. The music had passion. More passion than I’ve ever seen any globe-trotting DJ exhibit. As they ended their set, they thanked everyone and used their hats for collection.
I caught elderly folks giving them greenbacks; I was in shock. Almost everyone on the train contributed something. I gave them a $5 because it was all I carried.
When I made it home, I felt like a new man. The creative juices were flowing and I made some of the best mix tapes of my career. But more important was the idea that sprouted from that night on the subway.
It took a week of riding the R back and forth, but I finally managed to track Alfonso and Alejandro down. I pitched them my idea, which was difficult considering my broken Spanish and their shattered English.
But they agreed. I booked us some studio time, laid down tracks, and mixed the whole thing into something no one had ever heard before. Their mariachi stylings infused with my house breakbeats and electronica became known as Tex-Mex and Decks. That’s us on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Now, whenever I see someone playing music in the subway, I look for one thing–potential. Whether it’s the Asian guy with the cello-looking thing, the black guy playing sax, the family band, the twins on guitar, the doo-wop brothers–they’re all better than you think. You just need to look past the bullshit inside your head and listen. You just might hear the sweet sounds of something new. I did.
(c)2002 Rey Martinez
[b]Author’s Note:[/b] By day, Rey Martinez masquerades as an advertising copywriter in New York City. He also moonlights as a writer with some integrity. And to bring the cliche full-circle, he is currently working on the Great American You-Know-What.
January 2003 | back-issues, fiction
by A.C. Koch
([email]henry_iblis [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
I, Ghatu, continue to devolve. Like my century, I tumble from beauty to shit with a thousand senseless catastrophes along the way. At my side reclines the sleek Frenchwoman who has been my lover across three continents and as many years, a person of such beauty, intelligence and strength that next to her I am but a flake of cum. Out the window smolder the slums of Mexico City — any way you look at it, one of the most spectacular disasters in all of human history. Caught between these two elements, Isabelle and the ghetto, I squirm. I am the lance that pins the butterfly to the board. Vulgar, yes — but remove me, and the spectacle is gone.
* * *
[i]What is History but the brains of a god spattered on a wall? And what is Time but a coat of paint? Who is the painter? Where is the wall? And why does this god again and again drive this bullet through his brain?[/i] The answers arrive in the instant of my awakening and all is, as usual, forever lost. Isabelle grips my shoulder, breathing sleep breath in my face.
“Ghatu, I heard a gunshot.”
“No, that was my dream.”
“No, Ghatu, the dream was a metaphor. I really heard a gunshot.”
“That’s ridiculous, Isabelle. You might as well say life is a metaphor. How does one experience a metaphor?”
“I think it came from upstairs.”
“It’s like the difference between sex and a porn movie. Degrees, only. Both are experienced. Neither is metaphor.”
“Ghatu!”
“Dreams, if anything, account for a greater degree of –”
“Get up and find out what the hell happened! I think Jimenez is shooting.”
“Jimenez,” I say. The pervert upstairs. “If he’s blown his brains out,” I speculate, “does that make him the God, and this the House?”
Isabelle fixes me with an icy stare, the product of thousands of years of feminine longsuffering. I crawl from bed and cross the room naked. Clothes, dishes, cockroaches scatter underfoot in the murky light of late afternoon.
* * *
From the neighbors assembled in the hall upstairs I glean that Jimenez has indeed blown his brains out. This is a boon for the six families that live in the building, as Jimenez was known to be a packrat of epic compulsion. His tiny room contains a thousand canned goods, many of them decades old; twenty typewriters and assorted parts; crates full of light bulbs, each bulb individually bubble-wrapped and every one of them burned out; a closet full of deflated sex dolls, each one bearing the emblem of a different football club sewn onto the pubis; bushels of rotten garlic; seven horsehair top hats, each in perfect condition and arranged on a tall hat rack carved from a coppery timber not indigenous to earth; decades of issues of [i]El Pa�s[/i] crumpled into tiny balls and arranged in a rough pyramid; and many thousands of skeleton keys hung by fishhooks from the ceiling, not a few of which also bear fish.
Everyone in the building, some sixty people, mill in and out of Jimenez’s room carting away prizes. The canned food is the most popular. The defunct, bubble-wrapped light bulbs are slower to move. Rogelio Varela, a strapping young delinquent who lives next door to me, tries on one of the top hats. He struts like a king, fingering Spanish olives from a rusted can he opened with his pocketknife. He’s admiring himself in the mirror when he hacks a cough, bites his tongue in half and drops dead. The other six top hats remain untouched.
Meanwhile, Jimenez lies dead below the sill of the only window. Blood pools around him. He holds a poker hand in his fist — a full house — and the rest of the deck of cards is scattered in the blood. A small pile of matches seems to be the pot. No one is interested in Jimenez, nor will anyone come near me as I inspect him. As I walk about the room poking and peering, the Mexicans keep their distance: such a superstitious lot. They genuflect at everything and fan themselves in the stifling heat. Thankfully, I am entirely naked and a cooling sweat streams down my body.
When nearly everything of value has been hauled from the room and the twitching corpse of Rogelio Varela solemnly carried to his kitchen table, the landlady pulls Jimenez’s door shut and forbids anyone to enter again. Then she goes to the hall phone and calls several antique stores, a haberdashery, and the police.
* * *
Isabelle sits up on her elbows as I come back in the room. “What happ — Ghatu! You’re naked!”
“We are all naked, Isabelle, every one of us.”
“What’s happening out there? It sounds like a riot.”
I sit next to her, brushing the roaches from the blankets. “Jimenez is shot. The tenement is frenzied. They’re holding a wake next door for Rogelio who dropped dead the instant he put on one of Jimenez’s top hats.”
[i]”Top hats?[/i] What was Jimenez doing with top hats?”
“Seven of them. The same thing he was doing with a dozen sex dolls, a thousand light bulbs and a million skeleton keys.”
“My God.”
“Perhaps. In fact, I dreamt almost exactly –”
“Ghatu? Not now. Not now, okay?” She sits in the yellow light, head bowed and hand on her forehead. I rise and pace the room. Never a more squalid pit have I seen, yet I’m happy here. I own almost nothing, and all of it is scattered over the floor. The sink in the corner spits brown water at will. The walls, painted for generations, flake and snow fine, lead-based powder. A large funnel, nailed to the outside of the window sill, serves as a toilet. (The toilet down the hall is rumored to be dangerous.)
And here, in the midst of it all: Isabelle. She sits twisted in the sheets of my mattress on the floor as cockroaches, earwigs and millipedes skitter willy-nilly in the pallid light. She sits there like the hand of beauty in the till of despair. And only for that do I wish I lived elsewhere.
In fact, this is a jolly tenement, stuffed to the vigas with interrelated and crossbred families who provide for one another as if this building were itself its own universe. Mexico City is composed entirely of universes such as these. Only Jimenez and I, like black holes, were outside of this familial scheme. Now Jimenez has collapsed under his own gravity and I am the sole cosmic anomaly. I say this to Isabelle. She lies down and shows me her back.
For the rest of the night I try to rest but the wake next door keeps me from sleep. The women wail and pound on the walls and the men chain-smoke cigarillos. Smoke seethes through the joists and under the door. Children sprint about hurling bubble-wrapped light bulbs and typewriters at one another. Pungent aromas waft with the smoke as Jimenez’s canned goods are transformed into a midnight feast and the next hour becomes a gallery of shrieks and gurgles as everyone in the building dies the twitching death of botulism. At last all is silent and I join Isabelle in sleep — dreamless sweet sleep.
* * *
When the police arrive at ten in the morning, responding to last night’s report of a gunshot, they find a tenement littered top to bottom with corpses. It takes them all day to haul them out. I sit on the corner in front of the cigarette stand watching body after body carried out the door and tossed in a dump truck. The police themselves don’t do the work, they make the neighborhood [i]chamacos[/i] do it. I smoke a whole pack of Boots sitting there watching.
Isabelle went home in the morning, leaving by the window as customary, and noticing nothing out of the ordinary except that the building was very quiet. Where she lives, in the high-rise towers of el Centro, there will be no news of mass death in the ghetto.
When at last the police have gone I return to my room. The neighborhood kids are busy looting the apartments of the dead, stripping the wiring and the copper piping, but my room is untouched. Also untouched is Jimenez’s room upstairs. The police didn’t even enter, though out of superstition or negligence I don’t know.
Neither did they discover the sort of shanty town on the roof of the building where a dozen or so corpses lie rotting in the sun and acid rain. Their fluids seep down through the roof and into Jimenez’s room which is already steeped in blood. I begin to notice drips in my ceiling early one evening as I’m tidying up in expectation of Isabelle. She despises my quarters, yet I believe she also finds a certain thrill in the whole ordeal of driving through the ghetto, covering her evening dress with a dirty smock and climbing the ladder to my window so as to avoid certain rape in the hallways by Rogelio or some other miscreant. The tingle of danger is transferred to me and I believe it is partially responsible for the voracity with which she pursues me. I am the ghetto, I am the night, I am savage love and brutal embrace. For a pampered city girl as she has become, what could be more piquant?
And so I tidy up but not too much, and I comb my hair but leave it a little mussed, and I scrub myself but only one armpit, and I wash the wine glasses but leave them spotty. I pace around the room feeling irresistible when I notice the fresh stains on the sheets. Blood is dripping from the ceiling.
It’s just then that Isabelle arrives at the window, crawling over the funnel and turning on the window sill to let her smock fall open on her ivory body. She?s so white she’s blue. I pulse. She holds open her arms. We’re on the floor in an instant. The insects feed off our sweat as we fuck, and blood drips down on our backs as we roll one on top the other. My arousal is intensified in the knowledge that at any moment the ceiling will collapse in an avalanche of splinters, newspaper, bubble-wrapped light bulbs and liquefied corpses. Isabelle, sensing my urgency, draws me out like a bead of water trembling on the tip of a faucet. Alas, before I can drip, the ceiling bursts. We lay frozen in the unspeakable debris.
How do you bring your lover to orgasm when you are buried in decades of putrescence and the fluid remains of decaying cadavers? The moment is lost. Isabelle digs herself choking from the wreckage, shoving aside light bulbs, garlic and jellied limbs in a cloud of plaster dust. Together we make our way to the window where she vomits down the funnel. I drape her smock around her shoulders and light us two cigarettes. She doesn’t want one so I smoke them both, double-barreled.
“Why do you insist on this lifestyle, Ghatu?” She glares at me. As if I caused the damn ceiling to collapse.
“This,” I say, gesturing, “is not a lifestyle. Where you live, at the top of the Torre Latinoam�rica, in an air conditioned atrium with electronic connections to every energy node on earth, [i]that’s[/i] a lifestyle. This, here,…this is just survival.”
“Energy nodes, Ghatu?”
“I wouldn’t live where you live for anything.”
“That’s because they won’t let you in the building.”
“Besides, living here, deep in the ghetto, imbues me with the spice of danger. The ghetto is the new frontier. The squalor is limitless. I am the law and the outlaw. I am the mountain and the plain. I –”
“I’m going home.” She’s crawling out the window. She looks up as she descends the ladder. “I won’t be back, Ghatu. Not to this place.” She jumps to the ground and hurries across the vacant lot next door where a bonfire burns and shadowy figures slither.
“How will I find you!” I yell into the night. But her limo roars up over the curb and its back door pops open, swallowing her up. She speeds away like a black bullet through the wretched street as the neighborhood kids hurl bricks and flaming bottles at the titanium shell, already blurring with velocity. Isabelle, Isabelle, so strong and still so scared.
* * *
I set about arranging and organizing the objects that have collapsed into my room, ergo: everything that was in Jimenez’s apartment, including Jimenez. He had tumbled into a corner still clutching his poker hand in his rigor-mortised fist. I drag him into the hall. The other corpses and pieces of corpses I dump out the window where they are eagerly snatched up by the bonfire people. Something inclines me not to throw Jimenez out there. Perhaps I am already scheming to make him a part of his own collection, though I can’t say this is a conscious decision.
Nevertheless, I spend the rest of the night staking crates of light bulbs against one wall, reconstructing the crumpled newspaper pyramid in the middle of my floor, hanging the bushels of garlic like plants above my window, setting the hat rack and top hats by the door. I make a sweep of the building to retrieve the objects which were snatched up by the other tenants. I become lost in unfamiliar hallways which loop around and dead-end and open on still narrower and darker passages that are unknown to me. At one point I become aware of a succulent aroma as if a meal is being cooked behind one of these silent doors. The tang of [i]mole poblano[/i], the eye-watering sting of roasting peppers. I pound on doors, asking kindly for a bite to eat but my voice falls away into deathly silence and no answer comes. I return to my room dragging a makeshift sled piled high with loot.
I occurs to me as I reconstruct Jimenez’s temple of junk in my own room that he may have inherited all of these things from someone before him, and someone before [i]him[/i]. I go after the task with the zeal of an exhibit curator, arranging the millions of artifacts in, I must say, a much more conscientious manner than Jimenez had done. When everything is swept into piles and all the plaster thrown out, my room is nearly filled wall to wall although the ceiling is now over twenty feet high: the skeleton keys dangle from their hooks way up there, and sunlight shines through Jimenez’s high window. I rig myself a sling from Isabelle’s old pantyhose and sleep suspended from the wall. I dream by a factor of millions: a million sheep jumping a million fences. I awake smarter than ever before and blazon with the knowledge that what I have begun here is only the beginning and that from now on, forever, everything that exists will become, over time and piece by piece, [i]mine[/i]. That nothing will escape my collection, no object, no emotion, not the Author nor the Reader, not you, not History nor Time, not love nor emptiness itself — that everything should come rushing together with irresistible gravity, that I, Ghatu, should preside as curator of all that exists, collected, impacted, deep inside the ghetto.
(This story is a chapter excerpted from The [i]Cockhard Death Cycles[/i])
(c)2002 A.C. Koch
