119
Fisher Thompson
This book is work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Silas McCorkle
Copyright © 2005 by Fisher Thompson
Published by M.H. Dartos
at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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All rights reserved.
*****
Cruel steel birds come shrieking through the sky. An explosion comes to breakfast and rocks the Empire state.
The sky comes crashing down.
Humankind thrown into the war and losing fast, wet shorts and shaky legs, gentle weeping. Earth grumbling, wind screeching, howling, whipping up a real twirler, no gliding today. In a zip everything is going everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Screams, Oaths, Promises, Threats, Bone-Dead-Fear.
Day becomes Night, a bone-chilling turnaround. The populace has been transported onto a Hollywood set. Blood-throttled screams fill the air. Glass explodes and scatters from the heights. Smoke fills the shallow breathing lungs and burns the horrified eyes. A shirt floats down and through the smoldering sky, a ghost weaving and dancing; panic overtakes all. Running, running, running for life. All move as in a dream, as if drugged.
People push, shove and trample each other in attempted escape, but there is none possible, not from this enemy within. A grey man dives headfirst from the north tower, crashes to the ground in a smoldering heap. Frantic for air many fall down long flights of stairs to remain where they land. People scuttling scared, primal terror in the eyes, handkerchiefs held tight to faces. The air is thick soot. A man sits on the curb coughing blood.
Bodies fall from a thousand feet up, drop like iron balloons.
A vendor pushing his cart crashdance crumples to the ground, heart attack. Dogs scurry underfoot, tripping some, jumping into the arms of others. A woman drops to her knees to help the vendor but it is too late. Cars crash into the nearest obstacles. A bus overturns crushing two rumpled people as they take shelter beside trashcans.
The world is not Kansas anymore.
Air an asphyxiation of smoke and ash and the salt iron taste of blood. Ragged folks appear everywhere. Some the always homeless, some the newly homeless, most the lost and confused.
BOOOM!!! BOOOM!!! AAAAGGGHHH!!!
In the wasteland a child’s doll lay twisted and burnt. Hot grief is palpable. Stern questions shouted to the ghosts of darkness; Why? How? Why?
Shutters click savagely. Always the story, the story, the infinite bowing and worshipping, sacrificing all to the preeminent divine rights of the story. The preeminent power in this modern day hellhole of a universe. Cameramen stand steps away from human suffering. But always the sacred story comes first:
"…and I watched her die right before my eyes, her skin turning an unspeakable shade of green…"
Schmedlap races for cover under a collapsed wall. Under the odd angled lean-to shelter he takes a moment of breath. From where he sits it seems everything has been obliterated, wiped out, and again unwarranted and unwarned. They had said this type of thing could not happen to sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, the old and young alike. And now these mistakes are being calculated in lost lives and severed limbs. Negotiation is not possible with an enemy that does not fear death. The impotent, ivory tower donkeys believe intrusion and diplomacy satisfy all. An illusion they peddle relentlessly while mismanaging our blood wages.
The stakes in this game are too high for such ludicrous assumptions. The death toll rises as desperate reports are broadcast. Dread of the next abomination keeps a poisonous chill in the air.
Lieutenant Dume Schmedlap moves out, away from his impromptu shelter, looking for others who may also be about, other survivors. It seems to him that anyone not on the plane is potentially alive…somewhere. On the streets he sees others, like himself, who were just at the wrong place at zero hour, scattering now with the offal and detritus generated from this hellfire holocaust. All that was before is now present anew. That of course except sanity, which from this day forward will be forever changed. If a true understanding is to come of this day it will come only in retrospect. The pain is at present too overpowering to produce more than violent rage. Fear is the present export. Rage, properly channeled, will follow.
As he moves through the rubble and smoke, he stumbles on a large root protruding through the cement. He reflects that a dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief. What will come of this stony rubble? A field of disconnected broken images greets his hopeful glances, fractured light slicing though a grim mosaic promising salvation. With his mind confused and spinning he finds it difficult to concentrate on what his next move shall be. Instinctual panic gives way to quick moving lethargy, depression. Better to just lie down and join the dead, maybe they are the lucky ones after all.
But he knows that this will not happen, is not his way. At the same time a large part of him feels to have been forcibly ripped from his person while he was reduced to shocked inaction. This then is the true process of terrorism.
He wanders now as in a dream, his feet take him on auto pilot of the damned. He vaguely senses that he is on a mission of sorts but he is not sure what that could be. What is the anointing? What does it mean to be anointed? As it stands, he was not here in any official capacity. Just happened to be in the neighborhood when the sky came crashing down and hell came to breakfast. Through blurry and burning eyes he can see that he is heading toward the building, can see the large main doors hanging at awkward angles, like malfunctioning arms, wide open, offering no obstruction to whatever may wish to pass. Numb legs move him closer. Eyes scan the interior. Smokey, soot black, sounds of stone and steel creaking and moaning, someone coughing. Come on, boy. Wake up! There are survivors in there.
Now the search must begin. He feels a renewed sense of hopeful energy coarse though him. Not knowing what hour it is—a hangover does not a clear head make—he knows that time will move at hyper speed as the crisis deepens and soon darkness will descend with its inherent terrors. To the clear headed time is standing still, choking the oxygen from atmosphere
Action. Dig, dig, dig.
Piling stone upon stone upon plank upon tinkered wall fragment. This is the way. Piece by piece. He thinks he can see a stairwell. Or is this an elevator shaft?
Hard to tell in the gloomy mausoleum atmosphere. Maybe he should strike a match?
He does and it immediately explodes in his hand, a circumference of electric blue flame circling around his fist. He drops the match and falls backward, landing on his side against something sharp.
"Fuck!!"
As he reaches around to examine his hand comes upon the sticky warmth that could only be blood. His movements produce the distinct sound of glass crunching away under him.
"Shit," he screams." Smart move. There’s gas leaking in here or something else seriously combustible, and you’ve fallen in a shitload of glass!!"
Sniffing ineptly at the surrounding air does not produce the telltale scent of natural gas. But then he can’t be 100 percent sure of anything at this point.
He calls out. "Hello? Hello? Anybody hear me?"
Lots of shuffling and faint moaning he can hear thinly through a fog, but no one answers. Creaking, cracking, crashing, projectiles zipping by. Flight instinct whispers but he ignores it.
Louder. Speak louder.
"HELLO??!! HELLO??!!" he screams, feeling his throat tear, choking on ash. He can hear a weak mountain echo of a sound coming from somewhere above him.
"…yes…yes…"
The frail angelic tone conjures for him images not altogether framed in altruistic motive. Sure, he wanted to be a savior. But he was after all a man. What if this was a voluptuous beauty of a female? Odds are in his favor, sooty white knight to the rescue through exploding black tower. Hell, he could…(Lips) yes…(Hips) yes…(OMG) YES! YES! YES!
"You are true swine shit, Schmedlap. A real beauty!!"
With the dawning of this tragedy his life has opened into a new and "other" desperate universe. All must as a matter of course be reorganized, re-categorized, be come to terms with. For starters, no tomcatting around these troubled ruins in quest of punani. Repress the irresistible synchronicity of sex and death.
That was for a different time and place.
Now was a time for heroes and whether he liked it or not he was cast in the starring role that comes from looking death in the face and finding in it nothing but cruelty, sorrow, emptiness and shock.
Gone is the old. Here to stay is the new. This used to be his world, safe haven, urban dystopia. Now it is a fractured montage; toxic ash, madness, primal screams, mangled bodies.
*****
"Reality is a thin line between denial and paranoia."
When the cock crows waking sunshine, the dim glow filtering in rumbles from war slammed streets in heavy tones, mumbles unimaginable horrors. Smells bitter acidic. Ash falling still, though drifting lazily. Steady trudging human stains slumping along in packs. Wakeup will come with a huge excise tax.
One day only...PROMISE.
Schmedlap refuses to uncoil and move, apathetic but abysmally scared, decides to lie where he is. Falls into a fugue. Brain traffic onrush. Fly by images gnat around, buzz his ears, slap his face. Migraine aura. Disconnected realities, cruelly distinct, but something tying them together, something horrific, something unbelievable. Memories...or is that illusions, harass him demanding attention. He drifts in a wasteland between wakefulness and sleep, the borderland state, the half-dream state, the pre-dream condition, pure hypnagogic altered state of consciousness, sees through his lens darkly a giant grasping hand reaching into a fiery smoke filled door blood boiling, temp rising, duty focus his sole concern, gasping for air, hoisting, pushing, busting through to the other side, busting through to freedom. Steps into an alien world of people running, people screaming, visions, voices, weird insights, splashes of color, flares, sparks and cloud-like forms, people milling numbly by. And from these poisoned entrails comes a camera, a flash, mumbling mumbling mumbling, and Schmedlap, fire charred avenger, goes right past on a mission, bringing his rescue to salvation.
The sinister circus of pain wails on in the background.
He is drifting, floating, sees mountains and hills which come rolling against him, boiling waters, lines and angles, landscapes, wide expansive vistas, geometric forms, jewels, diamonds, threatening demons, intricate patterns dancing before his mind's eye. If he is experiencing a hallucinogenic episode or LSD flashback he is oblivious at this juncture to such high-flown concepts. He trudges along, barely cognizant, yet deliberate in action, legs going rubbery, failing, total breakdown imminent. He stumbles upon a church, stops at the church steps and sets her down, his rescue, she of the unknown, snatched from the fiery belly of the beast. Easier to breathe at ground level. He glances at her angelic face, soot smudged, silent perfection in marble. Her lips mumble something incomprehensible to his deafened ears. Yet he is not here, has departed long ago. Mission accomplished, rescuer and rescuee bonded in tragedy, delivered to salvation. They collapse together…apart...
Time slips…time slides…time abides.
His eyes slam open to his unfastened trousers, splayed like Tulip petals, his proud boner standing at attention. A rather sexpot young nurse is leaning over him, a straight razor in one hand, Barbasol can in the other. For a moment he stares as though amazed, he being splayed flat on the pavement no longer away with the fairies. He recalls that during his swoon—which lasted the same hours it took for the sun to begin its descent and the dubious ministrations of Nurse Betty to commence—he had visions of fairies and elves and Elena and Laura and nymphs and satyrs and trolls and leprechauns and sprites and duendes and pixies and goblins. It was not often his head was cluttered with such twaddle, and when he awoke he was mightily immobilized and under sexual assault. Isn’t this the type of treatment received by female journalists reporting from war zones?
He feels a cool breeze kiss his balls and catches the gleam off his rod. It twangs from side to side in the whispering breeze; ding dong ding dong the pendulum swings, she has fashioned out of his privates a grandfather clock. Reaching for it is useless, arms and legs pinioned secure. Yep, I’m the female journalist all right.
"I remember watching Jan Klammer ski down the side of a mountain," the breezy nurse says, continuing a conversation he wasn't invited to…"so closely flirting with disaster that the commentators could do nothing but gasp."
He has no idea what she's talking about, stares forlornly at his package.
"Oh right. Yes...you were a bit on the…umm…Neanderthal winter fur package plan, so I took the liberty of smoothing you out, upgraded you to the bonus plan. Love a shiny package, don’t you?"
He is so deer in headlights stunned his mouth hangs open as if his brains have leaked out.
"So much prettier. So much cuddlier. So much TASTIER!!" eye flutters, finger taping his pendulum rhythmically to keep it swinging. "Watch the nurse's jiggling breasts. Mmm…stay hard."
Kiss it gently into that good night.
*****
Schmedlap's anonymity came to an end when he became the subject of one of the most memorable photographs taken Sept. 11. The picture, taken by World News photographer Carla Reynolds, captured Schmedlap as he walked through a cloud of debris, his clothes covered in dust, a paper towel held over his mouth and nose, a collapsed woman over his shoulder.
Something about his photograph clicked with the public. The photograph was reprinted in newspapers and magazines around the world.
At first, Schmedlap didn't even know his picture had been taken. Then events began to unfold which clued him in to his accidental celebrity…
Anciently, semen was revered as the magical "Elixir Vitae," offering healing and rejuvenation to the adoring female devotees who drank regularly from the male "fountain." Angry women just need a little sperm shake, twice a day to brighten their dispositions. Sex research has proved that healthy semen actually possesses "as-yet unknown properties" that provide females with truly "wonderful health benefits."
To improve the taste of semen, SASH (Sister Assisted Semen Harvesting) recommends eating pineapple or drinking pineapple juice to make cum sweeter. Citrus fruits and cranberry juice are also recommended. Any fruit or fruit juice high in sugar content, like apple, melon, mango, or grape, may increase the amount of sugars put out in semen. Parsley, wheatgrass, and celery have been recommended for sweeter semen as well, perhaps because of their chlorophyll content.
Sister Amelia whips out a big bowie knife and cuts all his clothes off, then puts a restraining silver cock-ring at the base of his cock, and a smaller restraining cock ring on the tip of the cock, right below the head. She then injects his cock with a solution that will keep his cock diamond hard for 2 weeks.
"We have done extensive research ourselves and concur with the present findings; angry women need a sperm shake twice a day to brighten their dispositions. We market shakes of course. But we also offer our clients the choice of (1) drinking their dose direct from the spigot and (2) the sublime rewards of Nad Fry Appetizers. Snip snip, sizzle sizzle…YUM…"
He looks at his package and has to admit, despite it being his own parts under discussion, with its smooth shiny quality, its rigid pole-straight stance, it does look rather tasty. Sausage and Dumplings anyone?
"Not as many aficionados as you might imagine, "she says, eyes drooping sadly, "Our crops need steady replenishment as crops wither and go to seed, reach the point of diminishing returns. Such is the cyclical nature of life. Despair not. Your contribution is duly noted."
Whether mumbling or humming it is difficult to discern, but a barely audible tuneful monologue starts that obtains when such iconic characters are forced together. He looks down at his legs, shakes his head a bit, then shrugs.
She stands with folded arms listening through the screen of twisted torments to his predictable soliloquy. Every new captive began this way upon their swift induction into "the crop."
"Live forever, don't think so."
Father time. He was rehashing things with a god he no longer believed in (as if he ever had), bargaining to save that which has surely been actionably abused, blazing right through the grief cycle, sailing through first stage denial, bypassing second stage anger, triple-stepping to third stage bargaining, the place she believed he would pitch tent and remain.
She shakes her head sympathetically and debates interrupting him. She wanted to shut him up. Really she did. But something soothing about watching her captive men beg and plea to a silent deity touched her in places she could only marginally better service through direct intervention.
Planet Earth. Soon nothing more than dried riverbeds and exposed ocean floors–all that is left after rapid global warming; what a planet eventually looks like when it is overpopulated with tenants more concerned with exploiting its natural resources and bombing the snot out of each other than care-taking the environment.
He grins like a schoolboy at a frog pond. The sparkling bay windows wink at him.
The Big Dipper was high in the sky above them. He imagines it full to the rim, balancing it in his hand and not spilling a drop. Make mine whiskey, please. Uncle Jack of course.
He had for years nursed a steady reliance on Jack Daniels, his preferred "poison," had attributed the wax and wane of all things honorable and horrific to this uncle's tainted counsel. The answers to all life's mysteries were contained at the bottom of that particular bottle. Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires (There is a woman in every case). Anyone who told you otherwise was just trying to sell you something. At any rate, any argument could be twisted to his side, a stormy slantsman from way back.
A flicker of his bound stripped self flashes before him and is quickly doused by a whiskey splash. This one splash he was allowed so long as he drank his daily allotment of fruit juices, fresh squeezed by his own hands in the sumptuous kitchen. Sister Amelia, his captor, and Sister Janice-clan leader, had immediately upon his arrival put him on a program of exercise (You are a bit of a chub), strict diet, and daily semen harvesting. "You will now join the others and become part of "the crop."
Thinking he had landed quite providentially at the place all not-necessarily-good-but-not-so-bad boys go to claim their share of pussy they had in their brief and pathetic lives failed to plunder (Reward!), he at first embraced his fate with a goofy smile. Always the resolute tie dyed optimist, which as he well knew marked him as a blathering baboon.
Another misstep.
A wasp's nest of apathetic uncommunicative females was sent into his quarters to harvest his semen and depart. No kissing, no coochie, just cold conducted business. The injection he had been administered guaranteed his ability to produce copiously at harvesting, a silent death row inmate stuck between resignation and acceptance, a sort of limbo for the oblivious. So, just jerk-off Jennies; no kissy no coochie. A manageable existence. Always naked and ready, his private parts a steady topic and concern, nuzzled and pinched and squeezed till he required immediate harvesting. Then he was whisked away like a prize pig. Not unpleasant until they brought in the machine; the relentless unquenchable machine.
He has lost all cognizance of time.
*****
Any life is made up of a single moment — the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. - Jorge Luis Borges
The place is raucously noisy; a rattling, clattering, rumble and crash like a collision of comets and asteroids. A strong rush of hot and fetid air races through the corridor. Schmedlap is huddled over himself as he walks, gulping breath through a handkerchief, looking for a place of brief refuge.
Whoever is keeping their underthings hostage from the washing machine better give up and toss them into the acid bath!
"We perform a service."
So they bagged him, milked him, bound him, let him run a bit too free he supposes, leaving him alone too long with one of their low level minion, way down on the food chain, she taking him on a tour of sorts, a proud munchkin, ending finally in the laundry room, chatted away like no tomorrow, turned her back on her prey, then he grabbed her, taped her mouth shut, bound her hands and legs and stuffed her into the industrial dryer. Panic set in and he felt at a great loss. He was still entirely unclothed so what would he…
You’re in the laundry room Einstein. Grab some duds throw them on and split out the window. A great plan. Too bad the window ejects him into a connected netherworld that may very well be antechamber to the den of debauchery he just left.
He figures that instead of running berserker style into the daylight, he would find better cover by penetrating to its core, devour the beast from within as it were, become the human equivalent of the ichneumon wasp. The intense noise and heat of this place suggest there are lower rooms, many of them, some even underground. Why underground? He doesn’t know. Just seems to go with the motif.
The inside of this building is a masterstroke in evasive tactics. Every step he takes clouds his path, leaves him to wonder if he can even find himself in here. Deep man. Really deep. So metaphysical. On a quest to find ourselves, are we? Can’t go on this type of spiritual quest without your handy dandy personalized copy of Ramman Sphincter’s new book, Going Philosophical Without Going Postal!
He stumbles along, beginning now to see more clearly. A greenish haze of light has settled over the area. Must have a gap in the wall somewhere. He now has a new mission. Find the gap!
To Schmedlap, finding the "gap" is the underlying metaphor to his entire life. But what good has it done him, just a lone rider jumping horses mid-stream. Right now though, before searching for this particular non-human gap element, he needs to find a resting spot. His feet are getting dog tired.
He sits right down where he stands, not caring suddenly if he is in the open or not. Not like the inside of maintenance unfriendly zones are high traffic areas. Any place in here is as good as another. He sits and stares across the open space. From this new vantage point he feels as if he has stumbled onto a movie set, a setting of post-apocalyptic doom. How appropriate. As he looks across the gloom filled expanse his eye catches writing of some kind, a name or a title or a code, jogging his memory to something that has been covered by neglect: the big picture. He struggles over to a dim dusty crevice, mysteriously silent but screaming mute, suspicious droppings, desiccated husks of insects gone, secrets tucked deep within this gutter stew, cryptic Cyrillic etchings, cuneiform, hidden so skillfully it is anything but accidental.
Cryptology is an art in itself and he suspects he has happened upon the work of a major cryptographer:
∑ ɸ β α Π
He has forgotten just what this curious code might mean, seems to him he knew at one time, after intense training and abusive punishment cycles, but now, years past, it is all a jumble of scribbles to him now. Pretty sure at any rate that the two central characters have a certain crucial meaning based solely on their their side by side placement to each other he is certain of only one thing; this will drive him bonkers until he gets to a place of relative safety and cryptology training manuals left over from his academic days; a matter for a future time. Prudent to conceal himself from the world at large, knowing he has at least a few angry young women out to excoriate him, those deadly hungry girls, he is careful as he makes for the daylight, shuttling out from cover of his impromptu underground lair, dirty, sweaty, no doubt putrid, still he takes a chance. He stuffs his hands into cavernous pockets, the baggy-way-too-big-for-him-bunched-around-the-waist-like-Charlie-Chaplain trousers, looking every bit the runaway clown, a comic sight good for a gas. His mind aswim with esoterica, tripe from a tossed away paper, how old he cannot know as he has lost all track of time, but at any rate obviously a slow news day, Tuesday of course, the worst, journalist Mark Lesion plugging a story about old world mysteries, connections to the present, ineffable, blasphemous, anointing and its roots, lice and other insects burrowing into sheep's ears, killing them, shepherd's pouring oil on the sheep's head, making wool slippery, caused parasites to slip off, assault aborted, going for the broad brush strokes, waxes wistful, lyrical as he drones that from this, anointing became symbolic of blessing, protection, and empowerment, a long circuitous route to get to the anticlimactic ending, Ash Wednesday.
Schmedlap was sure he was going for personal lubricant tie-ins.
*****
Astor (Attila) Larchmont comes home from work to find that he has become for all intents and purposes, invisible. While it is true he was not literally invisible, it would be hard to convince him otherwise. Attila had a long running argument with his spouse, wife, life-mate. He claimed that she expended great effort ignoring him.
"Why do you persist in ignoring me, Arina," he would ask, the anger rising in his throat as he tried in vain to grasp the benefits of Dr.Tygo’s anger management seminars. "Every time I talk to you you find something else to draw your attention away. Yesterday it was an ingrown toenail. Today the cat needed more food. And furthermore into the whirlpool, you just suddenly notice how the dust above the ceiling fan has become so thick that perhaps a cleaning is overdo. And while it’s not the notion of these things in and of themselves that piss me off see, it’s the way that you must absolutely and unequivocally twist your head, utter some nondescript words in the general direction of the intrusion; something, something, something, ANYTHING BUT LISTEN TO YOUR HUSBAND.!! I presume you still remember who I am Arina?"
"Hmm, whatever. That dust is rather…wouldn’t you say?"
Clearly, She had become weary of his complaints. After all, what was the problem anyway? Didn’t she have the right, the absolute god given right to spread her attentions as she saw fit? Free will and all, a sticky business.
Yes, Arina. But rudeness is another matter altogether.
So, on this particular day Attila Larchmont felt he had most certainly crossed the unreachable threshold of invisibility. Now what would he do? Well, there were always the Invisible Man comic books he’s kept comfortably safe all these years. Should be able to pick up a few pointers from that work of pop culture art. In fact, he might even find he enjoyed this new condition. Just think, never having to come home again, never having to "have to" again, never having to do most of everything he had spent up to this point in his life defining. Could a man make a life whilst invisible? He was game to find out.
He walks upstairs and happens to glance out the window across the wide backyard. In the house across the way, the upstairs light come on and shadows slice across the space like a Colombian Wolf Spider crawling across the face of an empty canvas.
Suddenly, he sees it. The unmistakable shape of voluptuous femininity that grabs him like a two-ton magnet hook grabs a big ol stupid iron fish.
"Wow! Mariana!" mumbles under heated breath, "some trimoungulus casabas you’ve got going. I’ll bet you got the pinkest puppies. Damn you’ve grown girl!"
He didn’t think she would mind him looking. She was after all getting undressed at night in front of an open lighted window and he was after all newly invisible. Hell, she probably would be pleased to know he was watching. And further more, she probably wanted IT!
This last thought pushes him over the edge. He pulls out his cock and begins whacking it fiercely into the wall.
" Ohh, Mariana, Ohh, Mariana, you look sooo good, honey, sooo good, honey, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh Yes, yes, yes! Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me…"
Are you hiding from your mama
Are you hiding from your dad
Do they know what you’ve been doing
With your boyfriends in the shack
Bet they wouldn’t believe
How their little girl screams
When she’s puttin’ it to the grind
And don’t your eyes roll back
When he lays a smack of his hand
Across your behind
There’s someone sneaking ‘round your back door
Someone looking real hard for you
He’s tired and wired and loaded to fire
His double action gun for you
There’s someone sneaking ‘round your back door
He’s lookin’ mighty mean
And I’m willing to bet, you’re teacher’s favorite pet
You’re a rootin’ tootin’ lovin’ machine
The unexpected tap upon his shoulder scares the living crap outta him.
"Attila," a vaguely sweet but flinty female voice says. "Whatcha doin??!!"
"Ahh…Ahh…Just looking at the window sweetness. Noticed this frame is kinda cracked, you know. Think we should…umm"
"Atilla! Seriously? I can see what you’re doing!"
He looks down at his hand still gripping the evidence, in flagrante delicto.
"Oh. This? Yeah, well, no need to be a Clackwangler about it. These new pants were a bit tight you know and I thought…Hey! Did you see that hole in the ceiling? I bet there’s mice in the attic."
"Mice?"
"Oh yes indeed. Been hearing them night after night. Maybe should go take a look."
Arina seems like she might be going for this turnaround, but she isn’t buying so easily. Humoring him is what she is doing. Humoring him. Did he really think she was blind?
"Okay, Attilla. Mice in the ceiling," you stupid, putz becoming the letch you were meant to be, "Go look if...I’m going to bed…naked!"
She peels off her oversized sweatshirt, drops her panties, pauses for effect, winks, turns and dives under covers.
"Good, good," this provocative low-magnetism hook hitting with a dull thud. "Get your rest honey. You do seem a bit tired lately.
Atilla quick zips and turns around pretending all is copasetic. Then makes for the bedroom door and heads downstairs.
They’re talking on the streets love
Say you’re giving it away
But I set them straight
Tell ‘em no you ain't
Only giving it to them who pay
Now it really is disgraceful
Really is such a bore
Who would have made a guess
Daddy’s little princess
Would be the queen of the Dixie whores
"I’ll get back to you later, Marianna. You’ll wait for me, wontcha?
*****
Schmedlap found himself coming home to Target Hill after meetings late at night, unable to sleep. He would lie down on his trusty Ottoman Rug, not thinking about anything in particular, everything in general, trying to clear his mind of his dirty thoughts like a good little boy. Then it would happen, a deafening roar as he slipped into semi-consciousness, jolting forward or backward in time as he descended or ascended to a higher or lower plane, traveling, he could only guess, astral traveling? maybe, but he was always unsure, to some distant land with distant people…People? No way to know if these could be called people at all, leonine at least, strange music piping through his brain, a suitable accompaniment for a trip so bizarre.
What was happening to him?
Next meeting night, home on his back on the accustomed Ottoman, New York Times with nothing in it he didn't already know, Schmedlap rose up out of his body, about a foot, face-up, realized where he was and gaahh! Whoosh…back in again.
AAAACCCCHHHH!!!!
A baritone is dying on the stage, a bomb blast is rocking the Kasbah, a desiccation of iguanas are jumping through the window, defenestrate us all. Nights are the language when silence comes. If it doesn’t come everything goes yellowgreenish. Cool yellowgreen.
The color preceding death. What is there to remember? Seems hardly anything now. Bombs and screams and death and dying and bugs bugs bugs creeping jumping fleeing crawling crawling everywhere over the floors under your skin as they leave little fibers in your skin like cactus needles and you try to pull them out and pull and pull and hunks of skin pull loose but the needles stay and you say you can’t take it any longer, death is a welcome companion you say you’ll kill yourself and if you do the greenishyellow brings you home. Like Odysseus without hope of Penelope.
His feet are like grand pianos but produce not so much as a note, a melody, or a dissonant harmony. Everything is ashen and smoldering at odd angles, cockeyed, crisscrossed, as if a fantasy dragon had swept the battlefield with its colossal tail before spraying it with demon-fire. He shuts his eyes and chews his bottom lip. He can only hope to die trying to make her (an anonymous she) in the backseat of a Taxidermist wagon.
A vibrant, informed democracy does not need trucklers but demands media that serves the public interest.
He doesn’t trust anybody, some days not even himself. It’s becoming a battle of major proportions, turning him into Public Enemy #1 of sorts. Just last evening he was out at the Rococo Bar & Grill, stopping in for one of their famous Drip and Dunk burgers. He was just biting into his awaited prize when he felt eyes burning into his skull. Two holes being bored center spine setting him to tingle all over. In a flash his mind qualified: it’s the burger, no the coke, no the beer, no the ever present background lurking hobgoblin of his fears—someone is staring at him!!
Turning around he saw a Middle Eastern-ish looking man—can you say kebob?—slumped forward at his table, eyes squinted half shut, staring so it seemed directly at him. So unnerved was Schmedlap by this—Good God! They’re everywhere. A man can’t eat in peace anymore!!—then immediately rose, burger in hand, and sprinted out the door, leaving tab unpaid. The cashier gave chase but relented after Schmedlap darted in front of a passing bus of tourists, and just escaping death, dashed into an alleyway across the street.
All things change, nothing remains the same. Schmedlap knows that among these changes he could never go back to Rococo’s again. Of course, settling up the issue of the unpaid tab was the least of his concerns, more troubling was the large picture issue: THEY know he frequented there! Only one solution: stay away, stay away, and stay away. Did I say stay away?
Exactly. Life was for him becoming a series of rapidly diminishing possibilities.
No sooner does Schmedlap leave Rococo's than a bomb takes out the place and half the block around it. Good thing he hit the ground running! He dives for cover behind the line of cars, curbside. He immediately grasps that if he hadn't skanked his favorite Bar and Grill and absconded like a rat, he would be like…well…anyone unlucky enough to pay their tab and hang around. He does not exactly jump to adopting skipping out as a new philosophy but the idea does not exactly slap him upside the head as morally repugnant as he once believed it to be.
"Anyway, he rationalizes, the easy elixir of the true coward, "skipping out is less offensive than dying for social etiquette."
*****
"Things have not quite turned out the way I’d like, you know. I originally came into this assignment with the mind of a bit of excitement. But all we do here is pretend to know something secret so we can hide it from someone else in another department who’s itching to get close to some of us in the hopes of discovering secrets. Kind of depressing really, Not the sort of James Bond life I had in mind. Have they ever issued you a gun?"
"No. Nothing of the sort. Most I ever got was a slightly used fountain pen."
"Really? The shame. You’d think with this supposed tight lipped secret society aspect of our assignment we’d be privy to a bit more…appreciation."
"Well, Schmedlap. Maybe for you it’s that way, I mean, so utterly serious and all, because of your bachelor status."
"What’s that?" he says excitedly, not as a question of ‘what does bachelor status mean?’ but in an attitude of "Really?"
"What I mean to say," begins Trollope, "for instance, using myself as example, I find that marriage provides me a steady ground, a stable footing, the security of having secured a place of sanity when the world spins out of control. Some of my darkest days have been turned around because of this."