Issue 22

Ascher/Straus

Ten a.m. the next morning Jimmy’s got the ancient Mr. Coffee zzz-zzz-ing and chugging and his laundry going in Junie’s half-size machine.

“I could eat some scrambled eggs.”

“I guess I could make some eggs.”

“Don’t like eggs?”

“I could try’n mix’m’up without looking at them. If you really have to have an egg.”

“I have to admit that I really am in the mood for an egg.”

“Okeedoke then.”

Junie slams a pan down on the stove and in a second a couple of eggs are sizzling as if being deep-fried.

Waldo hasn’t been home for days, but no one thinks about it until the phone rings and it’s Waldo calling to explain why he hasn’t been home.

“Hi, honey,” she says. “Oh, yeah? Really? Well, gee, I think it was David who noticed the picture was out, but it never occurred to me—and I don’t think it occurred to Jimmy or Junior or David or even little Ollie or Elinore or Lauren—that the whole Northeastern Seaboard was without a picture because you fucked up again, honey. Huh? I SAID, BOY, I BET YOU COULD GO FOR A PIECE OF MY HOMEMADE PIE RIGHT NOW, HUH? PIE. YUP. COMIN’ HOME TONIGHT, HONEY? WELL I’LL HAVE JIMMY’N’JUNIOR HELP ME GET SOME PIES UP THEN! Bye, honey.”

Hangs up and says, “The truth is, last time he was home he ate about half the pie.”

“Two thirds of the pie!” Junior says.

“Five or six pies,” Jimmy says, honking.

This is one of those moments when, for no reason at all, everyone’s suddenly in high spirits and the high spirits lend each one an exaggerated visual magnetism that immediately attracts viewers like a light in the window.

“He sure loves his pie, I guess,” Elinore says.

“I was afraid to take a piece,” Junie says.

“Me too!”

Jittery and honking, coughing and giggling, their laughter is reaching a crescendo.

“Well, let’s face it. He’s famous for his appetite.”

“True. Without his appetite, what is he?”

“That must be his job then.”

“Does everyone have a job to do? And is every job we have to do a stupid job? The stupid job we have to do the way we’re known and remembered?”

“What’s my stupid job?”

“Haven’t found anything stupid enough to be your job!”

“Just stir that. Stir that vigorously.”

“I’m stirrin’! I’m stirrin’!”

They laugh together.

“Hey, how come you never make strawberry pie? Whyz’t always blueberry?”

“Strawberry?”

“A strawberry pie. Ah lahk strawberry pah!”

“Sure. Whyznt everyone make out lists of the stuff they like!”

“All’s I said is I like strawberry pie. I like strawberry’s all.”

“Well, I’d like my own program. Just me myself alone. Not one other living human. And I’d like to exist only when I’m on. I’d like my entire waking existence to take place when I’m alone on the tv screen. And the rest of the time I’d be suspended in orbit in another universe.”

No one’s seen David for days and no one’s knocked at his door. As if, when he’d returned, they’d signed a contract guaranteeing his invisibility.

Every morning is like this: before getting out of bed you take an extra minute, longing for something to begin that never does—reluctantly begin to move, afraid to disturb the miserable thing that wakes up no matter what.

For example. One morning he’s told that his grandmother is coming for dinner and he curls up under the covers, daydreaming of the one he loved and at the same time cringing with dread, waiting for the one he hated. But, when she arrives, he doesn’t remember her at all. Thin and taciturn, his grandmother only because they say so, she sits at the kitchen table and drinks until they have to carry her into one of the bedrooms.

The hand goes instinctively to the throat and finds the smooth red line of memory. It itself is real—the fingers are always able to go there and feel its smoothness and its warmth—yet it separates the self’s two fictions of itself.

“The self has its selves,” David thinks, lying on his back with his hand unconsciously fingering his throat. “‘We’ have the self: the inner other one we talk to as proof of the reality of our inner life. But all other inner realities belong to it, not to us. Memory is one of the self’s inner realities that has reality for it but not for us. (It likes to rummage through its filing cabinets, while we’re preoccupied with the heat of the heavy ironstone coffee mug in our hands and the idiotic overload of doubtful information on every screen. And then, when we commune with it, it’s like a book that keeps flipping open to the same familiar page.”

When David goes into his room and locks the door, no one calls him and he calls no one.

Already one of his favorite things is to go to his console and watch the longest running comedy in the history of any medium.

Junie hasn’t left her bedroom since Waldo came back from the outer islands.

Her voice is a harsh quaver.

“Yes, Waldo,” “No, Waldo,” “Okay, Waldo,” like a sick little girl.

The first time she hears herself say, “Yes, Waldo, honey,” the pathos in her weak croaking makes her cry. And the sound of her own quiet crying even more than of her pathetic croaking gives her the feeling that she must have been abandoned in infancy. She can almost feel her memories adjusting to the modulations of her voice and when Waldo looks in he’s affected deeply by the image of the sad child curled up in bed.

For a while it’s strangely quiet in the house and then Junie wants her girlfriends around her bedside, as if to say good-bye. Her little bedroom is crowded with well-wishers, but after a while a general depression sets in and someone turns on the set.

On screen a beautiful twelve-year-old is wrinkling her nose and saying, “Ooh! I think Mom’s made fish sticks again!”

The little brother gets a louder, crisper laugh by asking, “How far below the national poverty line does that mean we are, Sis?”

“It doesn’t mean we’re poor, son,” Dad says. “It’s just our way of reminding ourselves that a day doesn’t go by without our having to swallow something that stinks.”

Jimmy’s cursing, keys are jingling, can’t get the fuckn thing in the lock. As soon as he’s in, thumps the grocery bag on the red formica table top, races through the kitchen to Junie’s bedroom door.

“Hope I don’t fuck this one up too,” he says, his voice pinched with anxiety.

“Can’t fuck this one up, Jim. Can not! They only give you so many fuckups per reincarnation. Understand that, James?”

He starts banging pans around on the stove, frying something, running water in the sink, washing some of the filthy dishes that are always piled up there.

Junie’s lounging in bed in her country home, waking to the sound of the gushing brook down below the back porch and sloping garden. The water continues to splash and gurgle pleasantly, running over stones, down into the dark and mossy drain at the bottom of everything, until the gurgling water starts to spatter strangely and the spattering becomes an unpleasant sizzle, the sizzle giving off the savory stench of pan-fried meat.

She gets up, closes the door, gets back into bed and covers her head with a pillow.

The front door chimes sound.

It’s Junior and bean-faced Ollie.

“Gotta be real quiet t’day, kids,” Jimmy says. “Cause your mother’s in there and she’s very sick. Understand?”

“She’s in there?” Ollie says, jerking his long head toward the kitchen.

“She’s in her bedroom. She’s sick and she’s in bed, Ollie. She may even be dying, for all we know. At first we thought it was just a terrible head cold, but it’s something much worse. It may be that new virus they’ve isolated in the rotten housing of old tv sets. But we don’t want to jump to conclusions. If it does turn out to be the new tv virus, we’re sunk—because we can’t afford a new tv and without her tv she’s as good as dead. The important thing is that we have to act normal for once and keep it down, okay?”

Half-an-hour later Junior’s running across the kitchen, screaming, “Fuck you, fuck you, you fuckn asshole!” and Jimmy catches him and hits him hard just as he’s trying to dive under the table. Gets tangled in the chrome chair legs, panics, gets up too fast and bangs his head hard on the solid wood table bottom.

“Fish sticks.”

“How many?”

“About eighteen. Enough?”

“Should be enough.”

“I dunno. Your Dad sure likes his fish sticks.”

“Eighteen–twenty-two–twenty-five–how about Ollie? How many fish sticks can you eat, Ollie?”

“I’d rather go home an’ eat my Mom’s tuna melt.”

“Junior? Do me a favor and open a window.”

It’s late in the afternoon and David’s in his room monitoring Junior with the blinds half-drawn and a depressingly deep and warm orange light on the green vines of his fragrant vinyl wall-covering. Junior’s in the kitchen with his hand cupped around the telephone mouthpiece, talking low enough not to be overheard and loud enough to draw attention to the fact that he doesn’t want to be overheard, taking a look every once in a while at the door leading to the livingroom and satellite bedrooms, listening for a telltale creak in case his Gramma (who’s supposedly there to look after his Mom) suddenly drags herself up from her drunken sleep or his Mom crawls in from her so-called deathbed. When Junior’s Gramma wakes up suddenly like that she sometimes forgets who she is and starts pulling out kitchen drawers looking for a knife sharp enough to cut through cartilage, sinew and bone without too much mess.

“I’ll be gettn five thousand dolliz from Tammy, right? I give two thousand dolliz to you. No, two thousand! Two thousand to you! Right. An then you talk to Jeff—Jeff comes down, right, an you see him first cause you know him—I don’t know Jeff, right, so you talk to him an then I come along. What’s wrong? No, no, what’s the matter with you? I’ve got five thousand dolliz, right? I start with five thousand—no, I don’t spend it all—I hold out—I give you two thousand—two thousand out of the original five thousand—so I’m still holdin’ most of it, right? Two thousand’s for you to give to Jeff! An’ he gives you the plans. An’ we divide them up. I want everyone to get their fair share. You like this plan? Why not? Jesus, you’re worse than my grandmother! You’ve got an argument for everything! Five thousand dolliz from Tammy, take two thousand away for Jeff—I give it to you—to you! Right! An’ you give it to Jeff—talk a little bullshit—then we get the plans—but we better divide them up right away cause if you get caught with that money—oh boy I’d be in a lot of trouble! I’d be in trouble with the police, of course, an’ I’d be in trouble with my Dad—an Tammy would be in trouble—oh god, Tammy!—she’d be an’ accomplice—jesus, an ‘accessory’—cause she gave me the money!

“I’m so excited, I can’t wait! I can feel it in my stomach. Thinkin’ about the money. What else? If I get the money I can get out, dummy.

“My brother David got out. But he came back. How the fuck should I know? Cause he’s stupid, that’s how come. Actually, honestly, I have no idea. I was too young to know anything. I don’t remember anything. I don’t actually remember him leaving and I don’t remember him coming back. I don’t remember him existing. It’s like suddenly I have this older brother David who’s living in this bedroom they added on and who you never see. This is a sick house, this is a weird house—I keep telling you that, but you don’t believe me!

“I have no childhood memories, do you?

“David tells me that when I was two-and-a-half I was in the hospital. I was there for a long time—and I died there and came back to life. It was considered a miracle and I was famous for a little while as the Miracle Child who died and was resurrected.

“He says that we’re not exactly test tube babies—we may or may not be children of the tube—but we’re not exactly human either.

“I said, ‘But at least I’m alive, right?’ An’ he said, ‘give me your definition of “alive.”’

“He says that the only proof we have that we were alive comes when we’re dead.

“I told Ollie that my brother told me I was never really born, that I’m alive in some other strange way an’ all this other shit. He couldn’t tell if it was true. His brain couldn’t process it. I thought I’d shorted out his whole system! Cause it’s bullshit but it’s true, right? And it’s always the true bullshit that drives us crazy!”

There’s his Gramma in the doorway, looking strange, her hair completely black and piled straight up on her head like some infernal ice cream cone.

The sound of voices through closed windows restores David to childhood.

Remote, in a thin tinsel snowflake drifting far away, sleigh bell drifting far away from the remote tinkling of the nearby street, as if childhood itself were an illness.

When he looks out the window he’s looking down into the blue wading pool that just about fills a neighbor’s small back yard or toward the shimmering green image that may be a reflection or a memory.

Dive into the ambiguous shimmer between water and image.

Sit stubbornly on the bottom and open your mouth.

An inwardly glowing green light gurgles in while the eyes wide open in their goggles stare straight up at the thin blue matrix of the world.

This has always been one of his favorite things: to look out the window straight down at the eternal talkshow in his neighbor’s kitchen. Or at the evening’s odd programming from window to window. Or toward the intersection suspended in the distance between one roof and another.

Now he’s found a better way.

There, crawling across the interior surface of the screen, black and tiny, following the curve of a little band of sidewalk visible over the low roofs, skirting a dirty automotive plaza and almost eclipsed by the thrusting roof trimmed with pink-and-green neon of the diner isolated on its local highway island, Junior and Jimmy are on their way to the market.

Junior hugs Jimmy around the waist, then gives him a hard shove and tries to run away. Jimmy catches him easily and pounds him to the ground.

The supermarket manager looks up at his monitor and sees Junior walking like a robot through the bakery section, spraying all the fresh and packaged breads and pastries with thick doodles of pressurized orange cheese spread.

Now they’re in the supermarket parking lot and Jimmy’s got Junior by the hair. Junior manages to break loose and throw something heavy through the window. Now Jimmy’s strangling him and the harder Jimmy strangles him the more he cackles and the harder he cackles the more Jimmy strangles him.

A blonde woman arrives by bicycle in a back yard, jumping off while the bicycle is still in motion. Her mouth is forming words, but only the woman’s mother hears her, opening the screen door to greet her. As they approach one another they laugh because they’re embarrassed to discover that they’re wearing identical gray sweatshirts embossed with the shiny blue lettering of their favorite website. Together they lift the infant son-and-grandson from his blue bicycle basket, hold him up high and exclaim over him while he wriggles and gurgles.

He activates another site: an ancient grandfather weeding; vigorous grandmother helping with the weeding; sourpuss aunt; handsome young father in work clothes; young mother looking older than her years, with long arms and a patient expression on her long face; many small children playing, some in earth, some in grass, some in a green wading pool.

Without knowing what’s happening everyone makes life happen. The hot day with its weak breezes is either the neutral background for whatever tiny needle happens to be pricking consciousness or it’s there as the clearest and most specific boundary that defines what you’re not, the perpetually receding target of your whole being.

A child splashing in a green wading pool suddenly sees the clear fractions of light in the tree-like hedges. A little boy has to be snatched up by his mother because he’s banged his head hard on the metal frame and plunged in face-down and lifeless. Memories are being formed whose nature it is not to be remembered.

David is thinking about the unconscious sweetness of life. The unconscious and mysterious sweetness of the moment for the children being watched-over in their pool like new-hatched goslings. Mother with soft face cradling infant in blue blanket: tender kiss of beautiful lips on baby’s arm, cheek, and shoulder: kindness and love are one and the same for the happy infant and his tiny quacking gurgle is the sound he’ll later make unhappily in dreams, drooling over an impossible tenderness. If every life has its store of unconscious sweetness, its memories-without-memory made unknowingly with loving kindness, and this unremembered reservoir of unconscious sweetness is what makes us human, why is there so little sweetness or human-kindness in his nature?

One summer afternoon David is monitoring one of his favorite neighborhood sites and sees the blonde daughter lounging in the sun in a turquoise summer dress, her blue bicycle propped against the sagging redwood fence. The child is passing its time on the hot earth of the grassless yard shoveling dirt into a green plastic pail with a yellow plastic shovel and throwing gravel at the family dog, worn-out from a decade or more of yapping and dozing.

Toward evening he sees Waldo cross the yard, climb the back steps, look both ways and duck his elongated head inside under the low header. A few minutes later a light goes on in a small upstairs window and a dark rectangle appears inside the lighted one, as if someone, deep in the lighted recess, has opened a door into an unlit passage. Window’s been raised 2/3, so that the bottom edge of the framed pane of frosted glass cuts off neck and head above the turquoise summer dress that suddenly flares up in the bright foreground.

Bright bolt of turquoise disappears—reappears—from side to side—in and out of view from left or right—into lighted rectangle and then out again through dark inner rectangle.

Bolt of turquoise returns, rushes into the bright foreground, luminous as a paper lantern.

Balloons out and up like a parachute: bare skin, oddly reflective: dark inner, pen-and-ink line of skin, knee, thigh: delicate stem of shadow does not form a slender cocktail glass, but rises into a startlingly black and furry thistle.

Turquoise dress flies up and out of view.

Dark skin of Waldo’s forearm against pale skin of hip and belly. (David recognizes Waldo’s wristwatch, its crystal big and glittering as a flying saucer.)

A child’s face appears in the dark inner rectangle—red, no longer sobbing, distorted by something inconsolable.

Light as a styrofoam container, child is easy for Waldo to lift up high with one hand. Up near the ceiling light, therefore only visible to David as a shadowy blob through the glass.

Woman’s hand reaches up toward floating shadow-blob but in a second it whips away from her like a towel. Back and forth across the lighted frame, and in and out through the dark recess, beautiful human skin is tangled in spaghetti loops and stained with blood.

Drop down out of view and bob back up, wet and vigorously towelling off with thin towels that seems to have absorbed blood more easily than water.

Ambiguity of sobbing and shrieking lead David to believe that he needs to refine his process.

The blonde daughter is bicycling wildly across the dangerous Karolus Overpass. It’s raining, she’s pedaling hard and she keeps glancing at the dark street arching behind her—its random gleaming highlights unaccountably ordered and repetitive. Skids to a stop, dismounts, goes to the blue plastic infant carrier and retrieves two parcels wrapped and secured in white freezer wrap and paper tape, as if against leakage and freezer burn. Sails them out into the scenic ugliness of the rocky culvert and for a minute stands sniffing the addictive foulness of the black water gushing out toward the suburbs between centuries-old layers of fallen leaves.

Waldo, dead asleep, head way back as if a seam had opened at the odd juncture of head and neck, is awakened by loud noises. Looks out the window and sees squad cars at his neighbors’.

Tv’s already on. Switches from channel to channel: the same story of child murder.

Starts to lace up his boots, panics, stands up, sits back down, watches another channel, hears a name that sounds like a senseless, unforgettable version of his, hears it again and again till he has to accept the fact that it is senseless and it is his name, sees an image of David and hears him described as an elusive Television Genius, the originator of a new form of life-like television narrative, gets up again, opens the door and is surprised to find that the bright, unnatural light of visibility is a reality that can be felt on the skin.

The notorious child-murderer’s mother is having a cigarette on the short flight of cement steps leading from back yard to screen door.

Her head is like a cracked walnut, scalp showing darkly through thin hair, forehead wrinkled, shrunken body folded still smaller inside a pale blue raincoat, smoking taking more concentration than the withered being can muster.

Hears a noise and stands up. A nurse with a plump and kindly face opens the screen door and guides a frail, ailing man out into the yard.

Nurse on one side, wife on the other, the terribly thin man unrecognizable as father or husband is led down to a rusted iron garden chair on tinted flagging within a close boundary of basketweave pseudo-redwood fence.

Head down under gray wool fedora that has an almost invisible green thread running through it, like the most miserable life’s unacknowledged thread of hopefulness. A little wistful blue also in the gray of the slippers that are really a heavy wool slipper-sock cut out like a sandal to accommodate the twisted toes. Arms, in an old wool-tweed jacket, rest lifelessly on the rusted armrests.

Too weak to lift his head, he’s staring at the rusted vinework of the iron garden bench and at the glowing amber of the cane-head of the cane resting at an angle from chair to ground and thinking-without-thinking about the peculiarities of autumn sunlight (weak on the skin, profoundly saturated to the eye) and the daylit netherworld of the everyday.

The far-away world remains where it is and has no way of approaching the one as weak as wax inside his baggy clothing.

Between cold light on the skin of bare hands and the sun radiant in its bluewhite lake of virtual sky penned in remotely overhead, there used to be a region of warmth hovering over but never touching Earth or its inhabitants, like a UFO.

This is the region that’s been cut away.

He wonders if he’s right in feeling that a world already weak is growing weaker. And that his own illness is responsible for the weakness of the world.

“Now we’re like noisy horseflies making noise between two panes of reality and able to do nothing but interrogate what we see in every direction. The result of our interrogation is not an answer, but the invention of still one more reality that attracts more flies.

“To live out our life under a sky whose light resembles the light of afternoon television doesn’t grant us immunity against disease and death, but it does grant immunity against their tragedy.

“If I can get up and make it to the screen door, then time can start up again.”