Читать книгу Zig - Hugo PhD Yabner - Страница 5

Don’t confuse the title. The “I guess” is strictly because I was guessing I should name the chapter that. But, oh brother, I’m certain that this is romance.

Well, it all came about because I had this job, you see. I worked a sort of museum. Or not a museum that people tend to go to, so not so much a museum. It was a potential museum, an impending museum. I will call it the Impusendeum. Let me see how you spelled that, Stag. Oh, rightly done. Impusendeum. The impending museum. It was thus because, well, the history hadn’t happened yet. The history was impending, it was waiting in a nice little shell for the right people to bring it to the surface. It was an organization, you see. People, idealists, crazy people with ideas. Too many ideas. They were the ones who thought this whole thing up. Well, the main one of them, anyway. Why not create a museum for history before the history happens?

Ugh. I can see by Stag’s expression that I am not describing this too well. Of course, I won’t hold you, the reader, to his standards. You get it, don’t you? These people, or one of them, wrote down all these little manifestos and social reforms, invented a culture even, stacked all this shit in a building and waited for the plans to take action. Some of the employees liked to call it a time machine. It was no fucking time machine, let me tell you, but it had a certain je ne sais quoi. A certain genuineness to it that made me believe the bullshit. Made me think it was all really going to happen. The main thing that instilled my confidence in its verisimilitude was actually just the paycheck. Somehow these bastards managed to pay me every month, and generously, too.

And for what, huh? To stand in the empty halls and act like we had visitors. That’s right, I would stand in the Impusendeum all day, teetering from the backs of my heels to the toes, whistling and keeping a prosaically vigilant eye for anyone who stepped too close to any of the exhibits. Of course, no one did. Why? Because no one came to the Impusendeum. No one knew about it.

So why pay some sap to stand guard in the exhibits? Because the head of the whole idea was someone who believed a little too much in superstition. And why not? He was a wizard. That’s right. No, no. Not like he had a purple hat and pointy clothes with glitter all over him. He was a man completely obsessed with the occult. Whatever mythos or anti-religious spiritualism he fanaticized over was beyond me. In fact, he may have invented his own regimes or theories. That would make sense, being that he was trying to invent history. Why not go hog wild and invent a higher set of morals and physics, or spiritualism?

This brings me to a good question. What, may I ask, is the difference between spiritualism and physics? No, no. Better phrasing. What is the difference between science and faith? Can you tell me, Stag Ropehorn? Can you? Well, I know the answer. I’ll tell you in a minute. But first, let me introduce a character. Oh, goodness me. I meant to say a friend. But I’m all so rolled up in this narrative business that I said character. At any rate, he was a character. And a friend.

Thomas Biddler. Mr. Biddler. He was a fellow employee at the Impusendeum. We would roam the halls together, exchange ironic or mischievous glances to one another. That was about all. We weren’t allowed to talk because it disturbed the visitors. There were no visitors. But it disturbed the visitors. So we would just look at each other. I tell you, Mr. Thomas Biddler had the face that could tell more than any prose writer could articulate in words. He made me want to laugh every time with those looks of his. Not the usual eyebrow raise or the usual pursed lip pressed like a burst of laugh was coming. No. In a single look he could say, “Hey, man, I’m going to piss on the Stretson exhibit in five minutes.” Jocose of course. Or maybe, “Hey, dude, at around noon I was hungry so I ate a bagel.” All in one look. Can you believe that, Stag? In one look he could tell me what he had for lunch. Tried and tested, too. That very day I saw bagel crumbs in his locker as he was changing to leave the premises. That face. You heard that aphorism, or what. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Then why can’t a face be worth just a many? Incredulous, Stag? You puny shit. There are fifty muscles in the human face. Well, there’s about. Fifty muscles! And you’re telling me you can’t express legions, torrents, hoards of words in all those wrinkles, flexes, and shifts? Fifty muscles! Do you know about permutations, Stag? Well, do you?

“Yes,” said Stag Ropehorn.

Well, good. Because you can think of those fifty muscles as a permutation, each one capable of at least two positions or functions. What does that mean? That function or position A of muscle 1 can be in combination with position A of muscle 2, 3,4, and all the rest. 50 times 49, times 48, times 47. My god, man! I should make you write the whole damn thing so it gets through that weasel skull of yours. That may very well equal more than the 250,000 words in the English language. In fact it does. By so many fold! So why are you over there snickering about his face being capable of speaking better than poets? His face was ten thousand poems, shifting from one page to the next in its voluminous bulk as muscle 32 switched to position or function B, or muscle 14 to position or function A, and so forth ad holy-shittum. Did you get that? Ad Holy-shittum.

Yeah, we didn’t talk much at all. Even in the locker. We didn’t have to, all had already been said in those unperturbed hallways and galleries of the Impusendeum. Now, I’m not claiming that I, myself, can articulate my face like the veritable Mr. Biddler. No. Some friendships are only in need of one speaker, you understand. The one friend tells, the other listens. This was our chemistry to the umpteenth degree. I listened to those faces like I’d never been audience to anything. And it fulfilled all that was necessary in the friendship. So the one day I said but six words to him in the locker, I felt like an ass. All I said was, “Do you want to have lunch?” No sooner had those words been spoken then I felt like some alter boy defecating on a crucifix. That wasn’t it, man. That wasn’t the friendship. It ended in those hallways, in those galleries. We couldn’t take that kind of pretense out to lunch. And for what? To ring it out and try to catch something new between us. No. Because that was us. Not the us that the one of us knew as the one side of us, you see. But the us conglomerate. We were only meant for each other to exchange those faces. Definitely not to go to lunch and talk about nonsense. Any other subject besides the Impusendeum would have been nonsense. And that was work. Who goes to lunch to talk about work? Businessmen, maybe. That’s why their gender is included in their title. The words are even put together, as if their penis had been fused to their briefcase. They are one entity with their job. Not Mr. Biddler and I, though. We were one entity that could exist only in the context of that job.

That’s why I was torn up when he turned in his resignation. I saw it while we were passing by the Richards-Daugherty exhibit. He said it solemnly, with a twinge of regret for not going to lunch, paradoxically with that knowledge that it was a futile idea anyway. That was the last time I saw Mr. Biddler’s face in the Impusendeum. But strangely, it wasn’t the last time I saw his face.

On a Monday morning, right when you settle down to bite the first piece of toast, your nostrils all full of egg and potato, the paper in your one uninvolved hand, what do you do when you see something like that in the obituary? What happens to your appetite when you see the name of a friend- someone close, tangible- delivered up like a cold meat at a deli in some formally written three-sentence obituary? I tell you, that kind of shock will make you skip breakfast all together. Then you find yourself walking on the lawn without any pants, gripping your stomach from some pain that will soon transform into liqui-shit. Where did that shit come from? I didn’t eat anything, god damn it. But I’m not angry at the liqui-shit. I’m angry because Mr. Biddler is dead. “Found dead of natural causes in his apartment.” How dry. I thought long about those few words used to describe the most articulate man I’d ever known. I didn’t want to have that describe his existence’s leave of my world. I wanted his face, smiling up at me with some detailed description, wry and warm like some final page in that novel of faces. So hell, I thought, I’ll crash the funeral!

I had to find out where it was, though. Luckily, Mr. Biddler had given me his aunt’s phone number one time in the Impusendeum. He’d said I should call her and buy her Honda because my car was a piece of shit. He always saw me beating the starter with a wrench every day after work so I could start the car and drive home. This, of course, spoken without words. Couldn’t disturb the visitors.

So I called his aunt. A nice lady, few words by voice, she was. Of course. It must have run in the family, that whole face speaking quality. I guess. I never did find out which face was hers at the funeral. I didn’t look too hard. I was there to see Mr. Thomas Biddler deceased, and that was all.

That face. Oh. I saw it when I paid my respects. So hard I tried to wipe the wet from my eyes, just so I could see clearly, perfectly, that face for the last time. Tragic, it was. Not in expression. In fact, not an expression. Just a limp face. A dead face. Where had those magic muscles behind the brow and at the corners of his lips gone? It was all slack and blank, a true testament that his soul had evaporated from that body forever. I was so enraged I could have flung the casket over. Where was the face? I was outraged. No parting face. A blank page in that novel of faces. An unfinished manuscript like Gogol or Kafka. This moment, you understand, was not just me missing out on a proper departure. This was an inability to validate all that before. The man became rhetorical. That lack of a face lying there in the casket. It seemed to wash over all our past facial conversations, swooping down like a flood of banality over those beautiful countenances. The images were replaced by a void where dubious credulity and worship dwelled without hope. Like poems being tossed into a fireplace. Only the emotions they evoked could remain in the reader’s memory, but the grand words that drew them out were now all gone. Just that banal face. The dead face of Mr. Thomas Biddler, tormenting any memory that savagely yearned to validate my respect for the man. I can’t even picture it, Stag. How awful, to have seen something so intricate and magnificent and have it effaced by the very same damn thing.

I hold onto his memory closely. I believe in the memory of what he said. I believe in what that face was capable of. But I will never know it. You understand?

What is the difference between science and faith? The answer?

How much you know.

You see, Stag? I may not know what I saw, but I know that I saw it. It was in the face. But the secret’s dead now, the science forgotten. Now I only have the faith of my memory. The faith that that face was so articulate. He was, when alive, the only man I have ever met capable of conveying essays with eyebrows, haikus with hairlines, philosophy with philtrum, and soliloquies with ear wiggles. And you will be damned sure that that is gospel to me.

“That’s beautiful, Zig. Very romantic.”

What? No, Stag, no. That wasn’t the romance. That was just where I met her. Her.

Geraldine. That was the first time I saw her. At the cemetery. She, too, was coming from a funeral. We met eyes under an old oak, nestled in the nook where two rolling hills converged, she from the west and I from the east.

Oh, what a wonderful beauty, radiating, emitting this comfortable, this intimate… what’s the word? Aura, or whatever those hippies call that thing that follows someone around and predefines them. She had a very intimate one of those. Like a sign that had a giant arrow pointing at her and saying, “This, ladies and gentlemen, all who can see and all who care to see, is the closest thing to a real human being.” If there were ten thousand people on one sidewalk, and you needed to ask for directions, she’d be the one you’d ask. Not because she was plain, quite the opposite. You wanted to talk to this one. Geraldine invited humanity, wanted to taste it all, see it all. But she wasn’t an ambitious cunt, no. Eager, maybe, but not ambitious. She was precious, understanding, almost timid if it weren’t for that passion she pounced on everyone. Downright beautiful. So simply put, it gave new meaning to the word beautiful. She was what the word was meant for, but because we human beings have all gotten so ugly we whore out the word beautiful like we’re starving pimps.

You ever think about that, Stag? How ugly humanity has gotten. And exponentially uglier, too. Where once you could talk up a stranger with no qualms, now everyone’s in a shell. It’s like we’re these ships sailing around an ocean and we’ve lost all our radios. Come in, come in, I say. No signal, damn. We’re all shrieking mayday in that little radio, but the signal’s gone. Technology’s what’s done it, I tell you. It’s made everything immediate, entitled everyone to be a connoisseur. God damn if we all should have been so entitled. So what happens? We satiate our curiosity. In a snap, too. Click, bam. Like that, we can write off some athlete or musician or book or what have you. Hell, we can even write off an entire nation! Based on what? Immediacy. Well, what’s immediacy, really? It’s abridgement. Succinct details. No substance. It’s like looking at a cake and judging the flavor by the icing alone. Ha! Yes. We all just lick that icing off the cake, but we’re starving, malnourished because we never eat any of that substance, any of that bread within the cake. Like that damn kid with the hammer I was talking about, you remember? Beating that square block into the circular hole until it becomes mangled and incapable of being dealt with. Isn’t that it? That we incapacitate that which we choose not to tolerate. Intolerance based on cake icing, on glances. We’re hammering those square blocks. Oh my! Imagine. All of us, like square blocks ourselves, hammered into holes that we don’t fit into because we couldn’t look over the horizon and see the niche that we really could have nestled into. We fuck ourselves over, and by the time our sides are splintered and we don’t resemble ourselves, that’s when we start to debate our happiness.

See this, Stag? All these people are disappearing off the grid into pods, distant pods. Holes they’ve wedged themselves into. No more exploration, only consumption, postulating on second hand information, emulated sources. Just consumption and redirection until we’ve all turned around so many times we’ve spun on our feet like a screw and inserted ourselves, embedded ourselves on the one place we can now never leave. Everyone’s forgetting how to understand and learn from one another. They’re stuck to their spot, stuck in their pods, in their niche. Now it’s all just mingling, like we send out feelers, little tendrils to touch and peck at the other people, to tidy them up in a sentence or memory. Secured in our spot, running networks of these tiny tendrils and never actually making substantial contact, never actually moving. I can see it clearly. Dimly lit pods pulsing, breathing steady with little wires, fiber optics running between each other. All of it so dim, one pod to the next, tangles of thin wires. And all of it spread out over so much dark. It’s all so dark around the pods. What’s in that blackness, between the tangled feelers? What, do you think? Are we shrinking into ourselves, into our pods, and forgetting to cover all the ground between, all the darkness. Infinity is inward, I guess, not outward. So can that maybe mean that we’re doomed to do the shrinking, become more defined selves and forget what touch is? Until what? Until maybe we evolve into not so much separate entities, but new universes. One selfish fuck and all the rest turning themselves into universes. That might be glorious, eh? But why, then, can I only stare at the black in between and regret, watching those lights dwindle, implode on themselves until they’re seemingly nothing, tucked themselves away into their new nano-universes or what have you? I’m un-evolved, eh? Maybe. Maybe it’s sad to hold onto sentimentality, eh? Maybe I just can’t know (put that in italics), know like I used to. Maybe I am dwindling already and haven’t decided to direct my eyes inward. Maybe I’ll eventually see a universe that I can love as much as a touch or shared understanding between two breathing organisms.

But not likely. Not after Geraldine. She was the one pod in all that black that glowed bright, incandescent like a fucking sun blazing in the center of that string of Christmas lights spreading all their feeble feelers. As soon as you fell into her orbit, she had you for good. She taught you how to feel and understand again. How to know the eternity of a single moment. That was my biggest problem with her. The jealousy. Everyone that knew her either loved her or, if they had jaded that emotion, was so fond and intrigued by her that they acted strangely. Some even became scared of themselves after meeting her, if that makes any sense.

But there, under the tree, between the rolling hills, that’s where we met. It was green all around, I tell you. Green coming from so many bygone ages buried below saturates your eyes, as if every grass root has a story to tell, whispered to it from the dead below. It’s the secret to a full lawn, you know? Burying the dead underneath it. My father did that once. Special ordered cadavers to our residence to be buried below like fertilizer. Some neighbors complained about the smell, but he ignored them.

Picturesque it was. She and I, staring for quite some time, tongues sizzling but unable to move or express. No, no. Not love at first sight, but definitely something just as profound. Understanding at first sight. The one knew the other was in pain, in mourning. Yeah, sure, we were in a cemetery, but it was more than just that. The eyes spoke to each other, mine to hers.

We walked together for a bit, the two of us prone to follow the path of the shade from sparse trees around. It was her who spoke first. She looked up at one of the erected statues over someone’s grave and then that voice came out. Voice like a melody. But not any melody, the kind of melody you want to have in your ear during a winter eve, cozy by a fire.

“Strange,” she said. “I used to peruse this very same graveyard and admire all the architecture and statues. They didn’t mean anything then, but now it makes me sad.”

She stared a bit at one of the angel statues, then she picked a petal from a flower in front of it.

“I always wanted my own statue when I died. In the cemetery, I mean. Something like a giant thumbs up. Something different. It’s all so dreary and droll. Archaic, really. What do you think, shouldn’t we add some pizzazz to this place?”

“It’s probably not welcome,” I said.

“Well,” she shrugged, “who cares? Convention is being given a whirl everywhere else. Why not in the graveyard, too?”

Somewhere along this conversation she started sobbing.

It was one of her friends that had died. Winston I think was his name. She only said it that one time. No mention thereafter. Kind of a rejuvenating thing, seeing her weep so and then never mention the person again, her remorse immortalized in that instant of mourning. Mind you, she didn’t forget this Winston or whomever, but she certainly kept the memory to herself after that extroversion after the funeral. She didn’t need to constantly remind others of her remorse, it was with her like all other experiences, creating her and blending in with the good, the bad, and the in between. She was beyond knowing who she was. It was Dao, I suppose. Something of the sort.

At the gates of the cemetery, she passed me a card. I was appalled at first, thinking she was trying to render some kind of service, taking me for a sucker in my current morose state. But no. It was more of an invitation. This Winston chap, it turns out, had left something open on his way out of the world. Either I made an impression on her in those few moments spent through the cemetery- or maybe she felt whimsical invitation was best, associating the here and now together, what with Winston’s death and my consecutive arrival. Whatever the case, the card was an invitation. She gave me a hug and told me when and where to meet. As she walked away I looked at what she’d handed me. Seemed to me that the card brandished the title of some secret club or cult. I didn’t know. But I did know I would find out. For sure. I was in her orbit now.

The time was a Monday from the Sunday a week before. So in those eight days I had to busy myself. When I wasn’t working at the Impusendeum, I went over to my neighbor’s house. An old woman, an invalid. Clarice was her name. She was all right when she wasn’t trying to feign senility to get her way. Always offered me goat cheese and some strange milk made from neither cow nor goat. I forgot what animal, probably on purpose. Mostly I just ate the salty crackers on the side to vanquish the acridity in my mouth. There I would be, sitting in one of her corduroy upholstered chairs, nibbling like a pet mouse while she explained her most recent predicament. Predicaments found her like they were 49ers and she was gold. That metaphor is weird…

Right, so, nibbling I would be, somewhat askew on my ass in the chair because I had to lean forward for fear that I would pass out from boredom. Such somnolent words the elderly speak, befuddled by too much experience and regret so that by the time their words hit the air they’re mutilated by so much reluctance and contemplation, refined to a sentence that even has third graders rolling their eyes. What secrets would be revealed about humanity, I wonder, if those old biddies would just let the fountain of words burst forth, unmitigated by their timidity and regret? Sitting there, it was like trying to sift through garbage for food (a very real metaphor for yours truly as of recent). There were cracks leading to subtext in old Clarice’s yarns, but they were so chewed up and mulled over that I couldn’t detect anything beyond what I fabricated to keep myself interested. True, I never even knew the old lady.

So why was I there? Why would I listen to futile yarns and be propositioned into building her a shelf or offering mechanical assistance? Because she also had a daughter. Ok, so what? I was a tool for an old lady so I might lay her twenty-seven year old next of kin. So what?

The daughter’s name was Amanda. She lived at home because she could never hold a job, but she was never around. Always out running the streets. Part of me suspected she was addicted to some substance and maybe even selling her body for her next fix. This all might have been spurred by fantasies of mine, trying to form some loophole to accessible sex. Although, there were instances when my suspicions were nearly validated. Whenever she was around I made sure to ignore her. Quite a difficult task, trying not to look at something that makes your eyes want to grow teeth and chew her like some succulent kabob. But I knew that was the best way to spark her interest in me, ignoring her. I also was not the worst thing to look at back then, not a hobo for sure, and somewhat polished and mysterious like any other man of twenty-five.

Some nights it would be awful. Amanda brought home so many men, always different, rarely recurring. And some nights I could hear the bouts of debauchery through my thin walls. At times I could only hear her, and these would be opportune for masturbation, mind you. But other times it was all just thumping, like someone was trying to capture a hippopotamus on speed, followed by intervals of grunts, the timbres of which I never liked- always indicative of sweaty forty year olds who were experiencing a revival of a lost libido as they plunged their filth stick into a young female.

One night it was terrible. Clarice had called me over, saying she couldn’t sleep due to night terrors. So there I was, nibbling on baklava she explained was on sale at some store she couldn’t remember, but one which she did take her time trying to remember so I might get more for myself since I was “enjoying it so much.” All the while, thumping in the background was the ruckus of an infamous romp in her daughter’s bedroom.

“Oh, it was one of those foreign stores. Greek I suppose.”

THUMP!

“Are there Greek supermarkets? I suppose there ought to be.”

GROAN!

“What do you suppose Greeks would buy. Yogurt? Spinach?”

SLAM!

“I eat those things. Maybe I would like to shop there more often.”

GURGLE!

Yeah. Gurgle. This was a usual onomatopoeia issuing from that sordid bedroom, one I would constantly contemplate with sheer objective curiosity when falling asleep. Sort of like my version of counting sheep. How could a gurgle be so loud? It was obvious the gurgle was from Amanda, as she was the perennial element in all these bouts. So what did that imply about her? Was the sound vaginal, oral, or… well, I thought maybe it was best not to know at times.

But then, back on the corduroy chair, trying not to wince with each vulgar utterance from the depths of the presumably dingy bedroom, I was trying to force concentration on the old lady’s potpourri recants, and simultaneously wondering why she was so oblivious to the sexual mayhem occurring not twenty feet from us. But what trouble to pay attention to the jibberings of an old turkey voice, when some scoundrel is dismally and viscerally enacting your fantasy, mangling that two-legged sex’s viscera into loud gurgles.

Jibber jabber on and on, until finally Clarice told me about the night terrors. About some giant wooly monster, maybe likened to a teddy bear with teeth, scratching and banging at her door. It wasn’t until she said the wooly teddy bear monster gurgled that I finally realized the poor old woman was not only oblivious, but in denial. Somehow the nightmare of her daughter whoring herself out for heroine/cocaine/ether was beyond translation in that mutilating refinery of a brain, to where the nightmare had become something more outlandish and intangible, per say a giant teddy bear, that she would be incapable of recognizing the genuine fright of the situation, thus ignoring and negating all concern for a healthier mindset. And there she would be, routinely setting the table with goat cheese and baklava as she had learned to do so, cooing along to some litany on the phonograph that reminded her of her golden age, her peak period, and furthering her descent into that pod seventy-some-odd years in the making.

I tell you, I returned mighty depressed that night. That a mother could be so far disconnected from her daughter as to imagine giant teddy bears were the actuality of visceral sex noises- the very sex noises that portended a brutal degradation to all genuine emotion- was a testament to humanity’s adapting techniques. How much could one sustain was no longer an issue, if ever. No. The issue was how much could one ignore, how much truth could one subvert into pleasantries or nugatory audacities. How much could we snip away from ourselves? Perhaps not much, because perhaps we never sent enough out to be snipped in the first place. Pods by Jove!

Well, in those eight days before I was scheduled to meet with someone who had made a distinct impression on me- Geraldine I of course mean- I was subject to a whole lot of what some might call tribulation. For some reason, cosmically, things tend to converge and collide all in small episodes, not in eventual or convenient timetables. Sort of like we are all floundering and then once we are able to bite something, we remind the universe that we are alive and so we grow alive to that universe and the universe sends things to bite us in the ass- swarms of things- until they exhaust us to a state of dormancy, floundering yet again.

The Monday evening before the Monday I awaited, was purely out of obligation. The old lady had been bequeathed a collection of butterflies from some unknown relative. I say an unknown relative because she said she couldn’t remember who the relative was, only that the person was Greek, she thought. Then she emphatically stated that she was no part Greek and that it must therefore be a relative of someone married outside her genealogical trek or someone simply living in Greece. Either way, Greek or no, I was to help her organize her inherited butterfly collection.

So we sat together, eating pungent delicacies and looking through some lepidopterology book. After about three stale hours we’d named them all and I’d have been damned if the display had actually gained anything from it. She was happy, though. Clasping her hands and blinking at me like a cartoon mouse, she thanked me warmly as I stood, ready to leave.

Of course who should walk in at just that moment but Amanda. And she was looking like a bus had hit her. Moreover, as if the bus had kept driving straight up an orifice- which orifice is up for discussion. For the first time since I’d been visiting the old lady, Amanda addressed me directly. Never even a hello before, but now she tugged at my sleeve and beckoned to have a talk with me. Naturally I started sweating, nervous as a tick as I assumed she had other meanings for the word talk. What if the old lady should snap out of her denial and realize the wooly teddy bear is really just an onslaught of cocks, yours truly being the present trespasser. One glance at Clarice and that qualm was obliterated. She was still marveling the butterfly collection with such myopic interest that I may as well have disappeared off the face of the earth. So I did the next best thing, and disappeared into Amanda’s room.

Amanda’s room was one place I’ll remember always. The paradigm of a haven for nasty human behavior. Sloth, gluttony, and maybe a couple other deadly sins lurked in all the dirty clumps of clothes, strewn knickknacks of forgotten and lost sentiments, and the unkempt fish tank. I remember that fish tank well. Distinctly I remember it having no fish in it at all. It was just a murky pit of filth that had long expired any coherent or kosher ecosystem. Whatever might be stirring in that mirth seemed to be the perfect pet for Amanda. As soon as you sat on the bed, your clothes, and whole being for that matter, were entrenched in whatever hung around that room so prevalently. It was a feel, or maybe just the humidity of human sweat still lingering. Whatever it was, I can best describe it as the pungent residue of addled debauchery, hanging in the air thickly, manifesting in dewdrops on the brow and wetting your shirt and upper lip.

Instinctively we sat on the bed. There was no other place to settle, and it seemed the only refuge from the clutter. Her head was down the whole time as we sat in silence, I awaiting an explanation. Or better yet, hoping their would be none and we could sink into depravity without word or reason.

I know, I know. Geraldine, right. Well, at this point in my life, understand, that my experiences with women had culminated in fits of jealousy or were unresolved. Thus, it had become instilled in my character to one-up even the most divine of romantic endeavors, like some clandestine secret weapon. Besides, who was Geraldine? I had met her once and she had invited me to a social gathering. One can read many things into that invitation. Sobriety on the whole Geraldine issue came quickly, juxtaposed to the inebriation of hormones induced from proximity to sex personified. Sitting in her den, I began hauling all these revelations- or maybe justifications- to the surface. I questioned myself this way and that, but no matter how I spelled myself or my resolve, I was certain if she made a pass at me the moment would end with thumping and gurgling.

But there she sat. Amanda, head down, stasis like some depressing still life. The longer we sat the more I clammed up, drenching in perspiration from myself and the ghosts of other hedonistic encounters.

Finally she looked up, her face was bruised, not as if she’d been hit, but as if life had been walking down the street, saw her, and kicked her to the gutter in disgust. At that moment I finally had her under a microscope. She was hot as a demon in spandex, but her surface was bruised, cracked. She was aging quickly from all the sex and degradation, and she was seeking more of it before she ran out of the quality which entitled her to it. Like Ouroburos, but it wasn’t the tail she was eating.

“I need help,” she said finally.

I nodded, goading her to continue.

“I’m in a real bad spot. I’m in debt with some real ugly people. They say they’ll start collecting, if you know what I mean.”

My face must have dropped because she started talking quickly.

“I don’t need much. Just five hundred will tide them over.”

Yech! The more she talked the more I realized two things. One, this creature should have been born without the gift of speech. And two, I was definitely not about to get any kind of sex, just a bothersome dose of begging. And why not? I was already spelled out to her as a sucker, helping her old biddy mother every chance I got. That was the effect of all my efforts, I guess, pigeon-holing myself into suckerdom.

Eventually, after she begged and nearly teared up I said I would help. Mostly it was the threat of seeing her convey anything human. To express something as real as a tear would have shattered her completely for me, would have unraveled her as the ball of mess that she was. And let’s face it, I was objectifying her. Taking pity on something so specifically meant for debauchery is sick. I guess you could say that was my sort of wooly teddy bear, imagining she didn’t have feelings.

I said I’d have her money on Wednesday, as that was payday. I could have spared it right then, but to run next door and scrounge up my cash would have been more pathetic than I wanted to appear. I expected her to hug me or something, but nothing of the sort took place. I just slowly left, her head still dangling. As I closed the door I only had that image of her hanging her head and I wondered if she would stay like that until her next sex act, like some robot in sleep mode, waiting until it could fulfill its function again. The thought was somewhat depressing, especially when I passed Clarice on the way out. It held no reality for either of us that I had been in her daughter’s room. She watched me peripherally, indifferently as though I were something on the television.

At work the next day there were a couple of surprises. Mr. Thomas Biddler’s replacement had been fired and replaced pronto. As well, there was a personality test that every employee had to take. Very weird questions on the test, too. Questions like, “If you ate ice cream and your hand got so cold that you had to cut it off would you A) be happy that you had the ice cream, B) be forlorn and denounce ice cream, or C) go get seconds because what the hell?” Weird shit like that. I didn’t give the whole test thing much thought beyond how weird the questions were. I didn’t even wonder why Biddler’s replacement had been fired. The two mysteries sort of answered themselves. So I continued my day as usual.

At the end of the day, when I got into my building and climbed the stairs to my floor- the third floor- Amanda was just entering her mother’s apartment. I smiled and waved, rather sheepishly. She made no reply, looked past me and entered quickly, slamming the door behind her.

In my place I perused my mail to the sound of a gurgle thump session next door. No wonder she had ignored me. I would have cramped her style. This one had quite the vocabulary. Sounded English, but not so genuinely English. Like he was either from Wales or was imitating an accent to appeal to stupid women. Either way, that vocabulary! He called her names so dirty or eccentric I actually started writing them down, intent on looking them up in the dictionary. Most were adjectives, and most, I found out, were misused, which led me to believe he was also faking the accent. You don’t need to play smart with that one, I thought to myself. I could never understand, though- hand cupped to the wall- if he was saying “I want you to lucubrate” or “lubricate my member”.

Right, so the mail. In the stack of junk mail there was one letter stamped from Grummel. Grummel, you understand, is the company by whom I was employed. The words in the letter were brief, telling me not to go to the Impusendeum tomorrow (Wednesday), but to go to some business building in the city center. The indigo insignia and starchy bourgeois touch of the paper let me know it was genuine.

So I buzzed my way to this tall corporate building in the city center the next day. Up the elevator at the thirty-ninth floor I found the offices of Grummel. Well, a branch of Grummel, anyway. And apparently a new branch. The waiting room was sterile and nascent, and the desk where sat the receptionist had smelled up the entire vicinity with new mahogany. The receptionist was pale and frumpy, like human cottage cheese. I flicked a smile to her while I signed my name and she buried her eyes in her coffee cup.

There was one other person sitting in that waiting room, wearing a musty trench coat, ripped up sneakers, and bulbous sunglasses. He looked like some after school special antagonist. He was unkempt and glowed in the bright lights of the waiting room like an alien or a vampire, keeping some thin lipped grimace as he surreptitiously watched me from the corners of his eyes behind those goofy sunglasses.

I made sure to sit across the room from him, at the extreme diagonal in the box of eight chairs. But, just as my butt hit the seat, his left his seat and sat next to me.

“Harlan.”

He leaned in when he introduced himself, an effluvium of booze and the sea all about him.

I nodded in reply.

“You know you’re probably either really lucky to be here, or about to get really fucked up,” he said.

“Fucked up how?” I ask.

“Oh, I don’t know. But you are aware of Grummel’s reputation, right?”

“Sure, sure.”

“Well, what then? What have you heard?”

I told him I’d heard he prides himself to be a wizard. Harlan chuckled an unearthly chuckle. No vivacity or humor in it, just remote interest maybe. He proceeded to explain that Grummel wasn’t a wizard, and that I should refrain from calling him such things. Scientist neither, he continued. He’s a visionary, an experimenter. He called him some other synonyms, but I don’t remember what they all were because I was watching the saliva building at the corners of his mouth like he had rabies. We both ignored each other for a bit, then he tried talking to the receptionist, telling her to buy some plants for the waiting room. He didn’t suggest or ask, he demanded plants be bought. She didn’t answer and he proceeded to stare at her through the sunglasses. At some point his pupils turned from his gaze and fixed on me from the corners of his eyes without him having moved any other muscle. He thought I didn’t notice, but I started to burn up as I sensed him staring at me. A whole minute might have passed while he scrutinized me. Then he leaned back.

“I’m going to ask you a question… uh,” he prodded my shoulder.

“Joe,” I said. My name was Joe back then, you see. I wasn’t always Zig.

“I’m going to ask you a question, Joe. If, hypothetically, you had fornicated with every woman on earth except that there receptionist, would you venture to fornicate with her in order to complete your conquest?”

“What conquest?”

“Isn’t that obvious? Having sex with every woman on earth.”

“Your question doesn’t make sense,” I said quickly.

“Why not?”

“Because the hypothetical is impossible. As soon as I even plugged ten thousand women there would be girls just blossoming into adulthood. And ones that had died. And babies would just keep coming and growing at a rate impossible to deal with.”

“That’s why I said hypothetically,” Harlan explained. “You don’t need to give me an answer. I know the answer, and the answer frightens the shit out of me. You would fuck that receptionist. Of course you would. Because there would already be worse that you would have done.”

The receptionist looked up at this point. I tried to smile at her, which only made her attention focus on me.

“Hard to believe that you could do worse than that, huh?” Harlan persisted. “Fact is that after a while, after screwing so many women time after time- billions mind you!- that she would be maybe even attractive. How? Because your standards would have deviated after so much of the same thing. Hell, you would probably even start trapping squirrels, sheep and other things to have your way with. You’re a sick son of a bitch, Joe!”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, hypothetically I mean. Look I’m just frightened is all. I have to be. Otherwise I will just let go, you understand?”

I told him no. The receptionist continued to stare at me as if I had started the conversation. I kept my head down.

“Would you believe I’m immortal, man?” Harlan said.

I ignored him at this point. His talking was making the receptionist focus some deep hatred on me. But he continued to rant about immortality, mentioning and correlating silly combinations like gods, zygotes, rechargeable batteries, seers, mammary glands, and colonoscopies. All the while his head was still and staring seemingly off, but I knew that those pupils were watching me from the extreme corners behind the sunglasses. Suddenly the connections became less vague and more personal.

“It’s true. All true,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant was true.

“All of it.” He shook his head. “Grummel, man. Did you know his company has its fingers in scientific research, product placement, even foreign trade? He’s an experimenter, man. And do you know what I am? An experiment.”

When he said this last line he stood and raised his hands like he’d won an award, startling the receptionist and myself. When he went to sit back down he pulled his chair from the wall and placed it in front of me so he could look directly at me. Which he didn’t do. Instead he stared over his right shoulder, straining a gaze at me behind the sunglasses.

“What would you say if I told you he’s found- no not found- formulated the fountain of youth? I don’t care what you’d say. He has. I’m walking proof that he has.”

At this point he leaned off balance as if he were sneaking up on a rabbit, the rabbit of my doubt. And he was going to use his words to pounce on my doubt rabbit.

“It’s like this, you see. Life is trying to beget life. But we haven’t figured out how to do it internally, only externally between two people. So what he’s done, as far as I can understand (he speaks a lot of jargon, that Grummel) is made it to where my body reinterprets the sex I have from being an extroversion to an internal re-spawning. Doesn’t make sense, eh Joe?”

I shrugged.

“Sounds crazy. But let me tell you, feels much less crazy. It’s a difference between knowing and feeling. Yeah, I mean I had to be injected with some formula. Everything needs a kick-off, right? But now it’s all up to me for the maintenance. And what is that maintenance?”

He had the rabbit now, bewildered and incapable of escape. What was he going to do with this doubt rabbit, though? Kill it or screw it?

“It’s a game, I tell you. A game. That’s what makes me know I’m an experiment. Because I can fail. And the game has very specific rules, you see? I have to have sex with a new mate every twenty-four hours. That’s the perpetuation.”

“Why a new mate?” I asked. Doubt rabbit foreplay.

“Something about the genetics, man. I don’t know. Same genetics twice is no good.”

“How do you manage that?”

“Well, Grummel offered me other rules, too, you know? He allocates one thousand dollars to me a day via a bank account. So, if I’m about to die from lack of sex, I just go and get me a hooker. I’ve had lots of hookers.”

“Oh. So you have to get laid by a different woman every day or you die?”

“Right. And there are other things, too. Like the act has to be one conducive to procreation. Otherwise it’s no go, my body can’t reinterpret something that doesn’t beget new life. You know what I mean? So if a girl makes me wear a jimmy I just poke a hole in it and it’s a-ok.”

“So you’re going around impregnating hookers?”

“No. It’s not like that, man. I can’t impregnate them. I need the procreation for myself. If it transferred to a consensual procreation thing I wouldn’t regenerate.”

“What about children, then? You can’t have a child?”

“No, man. No way. Impossible.”

He fell silent for a while after that. Suddenly I felt like I was looking at a void, not a human. He’d let the rabbit go, apparently.

“And what about diseases?”

“Ha,” Harlan’s lifeless laugh. “I can’t get those anymore.”

“Can you give them?”

“That’s a damn good question. I don’t think so.”

We talked a little bit longer before the receptionist called him in. He patted me on the back and said he was glad to meet another experiment. If I ever needed anything, he said never to hesitate calling on him. He gave me a permanent address somewhere just outside the city. Although he traveled a lot, he always returned there to write personal letters. Then he bid me good day and strutted to the office in the next room.

I waited for a short while, debating the veracity of our conversation. Harlan certainly seemed to believe what he was telling me, to which I deduced might be the very heart of the experiment. When he exited he was beaming an unhealthy grin, looking at me with only the corners of his eyes. I asked why he was so elated and he proceeded to show me a picture of a penis. All I could do was shrug and then he explained that Grummel was paying for a surgery to help out Harlan’s “charm”. Apparently, and I only understood half of the procedure, he was going to essentially have a penis transplant. And after he gave me all the details that I most likely consciously forgot, he again brandished the picture of his penis-to-be, fishing for compliments I suppose. I probably commented on the girth or something, but eventually asked where they had found someone to donate such an organ. To this Harlan said some anecdote about black markets, hospital insurance policies, and poor bastards.

After he’d skipped away, I thought about black market penis deals. I didn’t like them, I decided. I furtively patted my crotch to reassure it that no other organ could replace the one I was born to wield. That made the flutter in stomach slightly subside.

I was called into the office after a prolonged wait, one that I guessed had been of the secretary’s sole discretion. The inside of the office looked like the broad shoulders of a business suit: square, firm, defined seams, and posture. I approached the lone man behind the desk; he with white hair and moustaches that were sharp like a swashbuckler’s on a face like an iguana or some other enlightened reptile, dressed in something like a lilac kimono-toga-suit. Actually it looked like he was wearing a business suit and gotten tangled in a giant curtain, but he sported the apparel with purpose.

A hand with whiskers unfolded from his curtain sleeve and gestured me to sit. For five minutes he watched me, twice licking his lips, three times tapping his cheek with all of his fingers, and four times clearing his throat. Once he burped, but this didn’t seem to be part of whatever procedure he was running to settle our introduction. Afterward he stood and said, “No, no, please stay seated,” even though I had never moved to stand. He circumnavigated the desk three times as if he were alone in his office, the curtain trailing him and once snagging on a corner of the desk which he calmly ignored and retracted a few steps to correct. Next, he took a stethoscope from his desk drawer and wore it in one ear. The chestpiece he held to his throat so to auscultate while he spoke.

The speech that followed was delivered in a stentorian voice as if he were addressing a large crowd. Even his eyes were off to the back of the room. It hardly made any sense beyond the first few welcoming sentences. Eventually he began talking of words and the importance to express oneself. Following was a theory that words defined what we saw, and without them we could not see. For this reason he said that animals could not truly see and were lost in a “labyrinth of linear id”. Voice was thus the great accomplice to the eyes, informing the brain to ultimately “see”. It is sad, he said, that animals should live without seeing one another, but only acknowledging one another. Speech was the great lubricator of creation, and the more words we welcomed into the English language the greater and more dimensions we could witness. He said that people of different language would never truly see one another because they could not understand the other’s syntax, and that translators were the world’s greatest liars. Ghouls, he even ventured to call them. Ghouls that snicker at their own mutilations. To learn every language would enlighten one to see all current perspective and dimensions, but also plunge them into a soulless lonely hell where no man or woman could ever understand a true need ever again. Phrases were language’s most recent invention, he continued. Although currently phrases massacred individual words, created diluted meaning to their initial makers, he said that phrases would transcend and become new primordial meaning. Here he paused, lowered the stethoscope and asked me if I knew there were initially only twenty-five letters in the alphabet. I started to question but he swiftly replaced the chestpiece to his throat and said that it was true. The first speakers would recite the alphabet, singing “a, b, c, d,” etc. as language. Then they reorganized the pattern. Then the first inventor realized there were letters between the letters, and the “w” was born from connecting two u’s. The same man had tried to invent the “nn” but was stifled by horrified conservatives. It is said that in Spain they took heed of this letter and named it “n~”. From then on, however, it didn’t matter. Combining letters became too easy, inventing purpose with each conglomerate group of letters. Imagine, not only a double u, but a triple u. Soon words were invented. And the rest is history.

Upon finishing his speech, which had grown in intensity and volume, he cleared his throat. With his left hand he smacked his desktop with an upward palm and the rest of his body erect, jiggling his iguana neck. Then he slunk into his chair and stared at me. Three minutes passed. I said I had at one point taken a French class, but he waved his hand, telling me not to speak.

He stood again and circled the desk two times. On the last go around I saw a giant piece of lint clinging to his curtain tail. I almost picked it off, but decided better of it. Again he withdrew an item from his desk. It was a calculator and a Menorah.

This next speech was even more incoherent and held no introductory statement or segue. He asked if I had heard of the Ashkenazi Jews. I didn’t respond. He claimed that Judaism had helped form the better part of what he called “accepted science” through the likes of Einstein, Max Born, Sigmund Freud and other names I can’t remember. It was through their perspective on life and faith that they acquired a better understanding between the cracks. Judaism their alphabet, science their words, phrases still being built. All from this direction our knowledge now flows. No other languages present. From here his terms got ambiguous, nebulous. At least three times he used the term “relative construct” pertaining- to my best conjecture- to the world. He wrapped back around and informed me that the mistake was that people wanted to build a religion instead of the religion, or the fact that they still used the infamous term religion at all. Science, too, was becoming an infamous term. The world needed a similar construct. A conglomerate of language, philosophy, spirit, and even food.

Somewhere in the middle of the speech I scratched my neck and grew uncomfortable. This man sounded like a fucking anti-Semite. A Nazi. Holy shit. I had been working for a Nazi. I scrunched up in my chair and let him finish, dodging the crazy lecture like overhead fire or shrapnel. Mortars of fascism, grenades of prejudice, and bombshells of intolerance all flew by me, exploding around me and trying to destroy my humane thoughts. Trying to destroy my compassion and expose the hard bone and grind of intellectualization behind it. He would char me with his logic to a skeleton. A skeleton warrior intent on making this world a safe and linear relative construct. A utopia of crazy sons of bitches, too focused on being crazy sons of bitches to recognize they were crazy sons of bitches. No. Not me. I would fight the good fight. History will teach me. Heed the past. Diverse and righteous be the future.

He sat down again, watched me after the speech. At last he spoke in a human tone. His intentions, he confided, were to center this new religion, science, construct or what have you around a very certain individual. Until I’d heard him say this I hadn’t realized he was serious about acting on these crazy lectures of his. My heart felt gripped by an icy fear of paralysis. Would the flames of justice be strong enough in my heart to thaw the icy grip, to expel my fear of impotency in the face of something so grand a force? I held my breath, ready to breathe my dragon fire on him.

“I want this person of specific interest,” he said, “to be you.”

My dragon breath fizzled into a sigh. The icy grip melted, as if someone had just read me a love poem.

“Me?” I questioned.

“You. Yes. You have shown the proper elements necessary in your personality tests I’ve administered at the Impusendeum. You show great promise to be a central unifying force.”

This shocked me, and I didn’t know what to think.

“And you will get a raise of five dollars an hour.”

“Ok.”

***

When I left his office, after having signed certain weird forms in front of a squawky lawyer, I felt somewhat rejuvenated. At first my thoughts were of how beautiful the world would be if I were the center deity. People would finally understand. Then I thought, no, this is crazy. No one will ever fall into a construct based around me. But a five dollar raise. That was something else.

The strangest thing about it all was that he had asked no action on my part. No questions regarding my personal life (which seemed a must), no further scheduling, not even a photo shoot for some pro-Joe propaganda. In fact he’d gotten rid of me as quickly as I had finished signing the last document.

What do you think about that? Well? This isn’t a fucking rhetorical question. I’m asking you, Stag Ropehorn. What do you think about that?

“Well, sir, I suppose that seemed a great honor,” said Stag Ropehorn.

Ha! Listen to that. Placating scum bitch. Listen to you! You “suppose” it “seemed” a great honor. Ain’t that the downright truth, if not through a passive aggressive filter.

My sentiments exactly, Stag. How could anyone not be flattered? At the very least flattered. This man with immense financial power, reputedly something too magical to be considered a wizard, was offering me the grand seat in a utopia. I was to dictate the standard of the world through nothing more than my history, my presence, my essence. Do you fully understand what he was offering me? These are not your filthy poetic devices I’m using to convey a smaller fish. This is the real big fish! This is actually what he promised me. Damn it, don’t you get it? In those thirty minutes I was promised to be the center of the world’s new religion, the new science, the new relative construct. I was the fresh slate, baby!

“Yes, sir. You were promised to be worshipped. I would be flattered, too.”

Said Stag Ropehorn.

You little fuck. How dare you hammer this into the wrong hole. It wasn’t about worship. Is that what you think? Then no wonder you keep throwing out that word flattery. This is beyond the ego. This was the new square one. Me, the new beginning. I would be the one essence, the one mindset, the one definition into which everyone would get orientated. Let me ask you. Do you worship your id? Do you?

“No, sir.”

Said Stag Ropehorn.

You don’t worship the fact that you need to eat food to keep alive, that you need to sleep to keep sane. You don’t worship these things. You can’t. You live these things. And that’s what I’m apparently failing to convey to the likes of you. I am what would become the norm, the id, the standard, the fucking indoctrinated circumstances of everyday function. Me. All of me. They chose me!

“Sir, please stop yelling.”

How can I not stop yelling? You’re looking at me like a sheep that’s about to be beaten with a stick.

“I don’t mean to. It’s just. I don’t understand.”

Exactly. You don’t understand, Stag. But that’s not a concern right now. Maybe, in time, your mind will wrap around it, consume it, instead of mutilating it.

Where was I? Yes. Start a new paragraph. And quit shivering.

Egad. Why won’t your hands stop shaking? Are the cuffs on too tight? What the hell’s the matter? Ok. We can stop for the day. But, hey. What did I name this chapter? Romance? Bah. Didn’t even get there, did we now? Well, I suppose it shows where my thoughts were at the start of this dictation. But isn’t that just like the story? To get in the way of all these preconceived notions. Fine. Let’s take a break.