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"Physics"
Poet and Producer: Richard Fox, Utah Reader: Diana Slickman Engineer: John Szymanski
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"Sky Lanterns"
Charles A. Swanson, Virginia |
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Paper sacks, like lamp shades closed on top, ready to hold a candle, a flame to light the flying
wish. Hot air balloons, no bigger than a laundry bag, ready to lift. The sky made ready, two stars already posed, the distance a little hazy as night dews drift. People, gathered to ignite, to touch flame to paraffin wax, tremble a little—with the night air, with anticipation, with the body’s devotion. These lights they let go, floating away, each one for the child who died last year. each a dream silent prayer lifting and parting each twinkle big as a star six in a group not quite geese no leader yet they fly against the horizon over tree-tops into distance no, not geese playground some fall light failing children run into wet grass seeking the husks forever the brevity of escaping lights twinkles that fire into darkness my sadness "Thin Places"
Charles A. Swanson, Virginia Thin places.
Sitting by my mother’s bedside today. The air is thinning. Years ago Forty years, I sought the thinness of place, sought God’s face. My people walked those hills, Mama’s homeplace. I see them somehow. I see them like I see my cousins and me running through meadow grass, We were free, free as I’ve ever felt, running, laughing connected, kin. I waited on God, waited in my grandma’s house, waited in prayer. Now I wait waiting on Mama’s waiting, we’re waiting on a new place, one we saw, dim, behind sunlight, one we know we know somehow within. "Earth is my element"
Jana O’Dell, West Virginia The say I'm too "on it" not realizing I'm just dependable
They say I'm too "stuck in my ways" not realizing I'm just grounded They say they can't believe "how far I'll go" not realizing I'm reliable to those I offer my time to They say I "expect too much" not realizing I'm just as loyal as they come and anticipate others being the same They say I'm "always negative" not realizing I'm just practical and try to keep my head in what's reality They say I'm "fire" when I'm mad, but really, I'm just the EARTH. A little bit of everything, all wrapped into one. "Last Son"
Rhonda Pettit, Kentucky of father George in Virginia
will rise on his own or not at all. Named for a farmer turned prophet—poet—transgressor, a tender of sycamore fruit: amas, the burden-bearer, will rise without ever learning to read or write will require translation will learn to live by the lines others draw or read aloud: . . . Honor thy . . . Thou shalt not . . . Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs . . . At sixteen did he listen as the Loudoun County sheriff read aloud the Declaration of Independence: . . . separate and equal . . . .We hold these truths . . . . let facts . . . . our frontiers . . . . be free . . . . and receive translation Too young, his father might have said, I need you here. Amos remains until the war ends, then hears heaven is a Kentucke of a place will translate will wear the word from hat to boots west to the margins of law and democracy will wed and offer future lives lines for translation "Whose Daughter"
Rhonda Pettit, Kentucky Who was Milly’s mother? What was her name,
any of her names? What did Milly tend for her mother? Sisters, brothers, the pot over fire, light from the candles she learned to make? Did she spin flax into thread, stitch cloth and leather, quilt, gather eggs and nuts, milk the cow, herd the missing home? Did she weed the garden, harvest turnips, fetch her father’s gun, shoot, churn butter and wonder, churning, wonder what it might be like to read and write? Did she take the bucket down the creek’s frothy line—dip, lift, turn, stare at half-buried stones going home, feel like one of them? Did she take walks through Loudoun County woods, hear a string of notes from a fiddle, a voice singing, all, all so far away she might have imagined it? Did she wonder was she pretty, would she marry, would she ever leave the county or survive the angry fist of life punching its way out of her? Did her mother die in childbirth? Did Milly ever wonder what lay beyond the Piedmont? What the journey would bring? Why a man was looking at her? What she might write if she could? Did she? Did her mother? "Bound"
Rhonda Pettit, Kentucky Virginia or Kentucky?
Church, house, shed, beneath an oak or elm? Was it raining, was it cold? Was anyone superstitious? Could music be heard-- fiddle, voice, wind in pines? Who gave the word? Who stood by to witness the binding of Amos and Milly? Was there a bible or an anvil? Was one any harder than the other? Feast or toast? Were there flowers with the dower? Face-to-face, how well could each read the other? Would love grow out of necessity or was this love? Were there, would there be others? Did anyone cry? Oral, aural: what in the air suffered a want of words? Who prayed? For what?
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(Avant)StoriesPlease make sure to address story submissions to Dave Sykes. Thanks!
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"The Fourth Chair"
Taylor Hathorn, Mississippi
Taylor Hathorn, Mississippi
We’d just gotten back from JC Penney when the phone rang in the kitchen. We’d been shopping for a training bra, and Kate, as paranoid as every adolescent female before her, screeched, “Mom! You said you wouldn’t tell grandma where we were going!”
In her defense, it was a fair assumption to make. No one ever called us but my mother, and when my mother became involved in a situation, it went from a molehill to a mountain in ten seconds flat. Buying your first bra was embarrassing enough, with the saleslady measuring you and announcing “a-cup” to all the lipsticked women in the dressing room a little too loudly to be
prudent.
“I didn’t,” I shot back, picking up the phone. “Hello?”
“It’s Terry,” the voice on the other end said after a beat of silence.
My first impulse was to hang up, to announce to my daughter that it was a wrong number and
then to get rip-roaring drunk.
Instead, I said, “Yes.”
*
Terry and I dated for ten months during my second year of junior college. He played baseball and had blonde hair and dark eyes, and when I told him before his double-header against Okatoma State that I was pregnant, he said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Not we, which was the language we’d spoken for the last ten months. I no longer knew how to think in terms of I.
I left during the seventh-inning stretch, and he never called me again. When I dropped by his apartment three weeks later, his roommates, Mike and Pete, who looked embarrassed, told me that he had quit the baseball team and maybe college, too. They weren’t sure. They hadn’t seen him in Chemistry lab, but he skipped a lot of class, anyway. And besides, his old man could get
him a job on the railroad. He was just in college for some fun, y’know, Maggie.
Yes, I knew.
I finished my final exams the first week in May and drove the three hours home, to the bayou, where my mother somehow already knew.
“It’s okay,” she said. It was an unexpected mercy. My t-shirt was too tight across my stomach when she hugged me, but we both ignored it.
My father had left my mother at the altar twenty years before, and since it was a shotgun wedding to begin with, she knew all about being pregnant and alone. We shopped for baby clothes at church yard sales and she told me grimly about mastitis and thrush but said that they were worth it because formula was expensive. As if in response, my breasts leaked for the first time three weeks before the baby was born, and she nodded approvingly in K-Mart when she saw the wet circles on my shirt.
Kate was born during a thunderstorm, and the nurses all came in to look at her because she was born safely ensconced in her amniotic sac or en caul, lucky and blessed, mmhm as a Cajun nurse on the fourth floor put it.
*
“I know I didn’t do right by her,” Terry continued on the phone, as if he had not been absent for eleven years. “I’ve got a good job now, on the railroad. I want to meet her.”
Her. I wondered vaguely how he knew the baby he’d never seen was a her.
“That’ll be her choice,” I said, although I wanted to make it for her.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I can understand if she wouldn’t want to.”
He gave me a number where I -- or she, he added hopefully -- could call back later, and I hung
up the phone.
She was standing with her shirt off in the living room, plucking at her bra straps in front of the mirror. “The kids at school will definitely be able to see these through my shirt,” she said sullenly. “The saleslady said they wouldn’t, but they could see Kelly’s and her straps were smaller than mine.”
“That was your dad on the phone,” I said. In hindsight, I wished I’d chosen a more formal word: father, male parent, sperm donor.
She looked like him: light hair, dark eyes, the way her eyebrows crinkled in confusion.
“I thought he left,” she said. It wasn’t the accusation I’d hoped it would be.
“He did, but he wants to meet you.”
“Am I allowed to meet him?” she asked, the same turn of phrase she used for birthday parties and five-dollar night at the skating rink and mascara.
I tried to sound calm. “Sure, if you want to.”
“What would Grandma say?” she asked.
My own father had shown up on the porch during hurricane season the summer I turned nine, and she had chased him back out to the road, clutching a two-by-four that she’d been about to board a window with.
I had watched from the porch swing, the juice from a grape popsicle running down my fingers and onto my wrist. I had not asked about him again, but my daughter was different than my mother and I were.
“That it’s your choice,” I repeated, although I wasn’t at all sure that would be my mother’s counsel.
“Does he got a wife?” she asked, and my first impulse was to correct her grammar: does he HAVE a wife, Kate.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe I could meet her first,” she said, slipping her shirt back on. She caved her shoulders in, hiding her breasts, and it made my heart twinge.
*
I called Terry back once she’d gone to bed. He answered on the second ring, like he did when we were dating.
“Are you married?” I asked without preamble.
“Yeah,” he said, as if there were a wrong answer and he didn’t want to give it.
“Does she know about Kate?” I asked. I itched for a cigarette even though I hadn’t smoked since I found out I was pregnant a dozen years ago.
“Yeah,” he said again, the only word in his vocabulary.
“Kate said that maybe she’d meet her first.”
He exhaled, like ripping paper on the other end of the line.
“Jenny might do it.”
*
We met Jenny in Shreveport, which we had determined was exactly halfway between Terry and me. My mother rode with us, and to her credit, she didn’t tell Kate that she should think twice about doing this, even though I could read the discomfort in the creases between her eyebrows and around her mouth.
Kate was wearing overalls and a lavender shirt, and even though she’d crimped her hair, she still looked eleven.
“What if she doesn’t like me?” Kate blurted as soon as we turned into the Chi-Chi’s parking lot.
“Then you come back out to the car and we leave,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt.
“That’s right, baby,” my mother said. “You get out of there and leave her with the check.”
We all laughed, even though none of us meant it, and I watched Kate’s skinny white bra strap slip down her arm as she walked inside, head held high, shoulders still hunched.
*
Jenny was twenty -- what a sweet little rhyme -- so she obviously got along famously with my eleven year old. She walked her out to the car, and I nonsensically searched for similarities between us but couldn’t find any.
“This is Jenny,” Kate said, and I noticed she had one of those stupid little plasticine gems plastered near the corner of her left eye, which made mine twitch.
Jenny turned her face a little, and of course, she had one on, too.
“Hi,” Jenny said, sticking out her hand. Her fingernails were painted black, a color I’d never let Kate wear on her own nails, and I watched Kate notice me noticing.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
*
Kate made the high school softball team, and her first game was slated for her fifteenth birthday. It was a double-header two towns over, and Kate had told me carefully that morning that Terry would be coming.
Terry had mostly been a disappointment: no child support had ever been attached to his newfound, half-hearted interest in his daughter, and he often inexplicably scheduled weekend visits with her while he was away on the railroad. Jenny came anyway, dutifully meeting us in Shreveport on Friday nights and bringing her back on Sunday afternoons with her hair laced into
elaborate braids that I could never do for her myself, even though I had wanted to.
“That’s good,” I said, even though the lie made the toast stick in my throat.
I could feel it there, like buttered sandpaper, all day long. I mentioned it to my mother when I came home on my lunch break, and she got the pinched look around her mouth that she always had when someone broached the subject of Terry.
“The girl’s got to learn, Maggie. Let her keep trying, and let him keep saying no, and things will take care of themselves.”
*
The metal bleachers burned the backs of my thighs when I sat down, but I waved at Kate in the dugout like I hadn’t noticed. She slipped out her black plastic mouthguard and mouthed, “Where is Terry?”
She didn’t call him “Dad,” yet, which felt like a mercy. I shrugged.
An expression I couldn’t read passed over her face, and she put the mouthguard back in.
It was the bottom of the second when Terry and Jenny made their way into the ballpark. I could tell even from the stands that he was drunk and that Jenny was embarrassed, and I felt my spine stiffen in response, like a cat who’s seen an enemy.
My mother swore under her breath and reached over to pat my knee. The back of her hand was bruised from all the blood they’d drawn to find the source of her mysterious cough, even though I was afraid I already knew.
It was Kate’s turn to bat when they made it into the bleachers, and when he heard her name over the loudspeakers, he let out an unintelligible but very loud cheer.
Kate’s shoulders squared, and I knew she’d heard. She had so much that she felt that she had to prove. I squeezed my eyes shut.
A swing and a miss.
“‘Salright, baby,” Terry yelled, and Jenny looked up at me, as if to apologize.
I could not meet her eyes, and I watched another pitch sail by. The umpire called it a ball, as was only true and fair, and Terry shouted again. The umpire turned his head, as if to warn him, and Kate swung at a pitch that was nearly in the dirt.
I felt sick, just wanted her to strike out so that the misery could end and felt immediately guilty for wishing it.
Terry swore, a word not usually said at all in a mostly-Catholic parish in south Louisiana, much less shouted at a ball field, and the principal leapt up like a shot from her lawn chair.
I’d gone to high school with Lucy LeBlanc. She’d graduated from the same junior college I had, but after we got our diplomas, she went on to the state school for a teaching degree while I used cocoa butter to prevent stretch marks.
It hadn’t worked out for either of us. My stomach was creased with white and purple lines, and her hair was streaked with gray from the decade and a half she’d spent with high schoolers.
“Sir, you’re going to have to leave,” she said, gesturing to the parking lot with her thumb.
“‘M not goin’ anywhere,” he said, swaying on the spot. I looked past him, watched Kate strike out and walk back to the dugout, her cheeks flame-red.
“Yes, you are,” Jenny said, grabbing his elbow.
He jerked away, and for a terrible moment, I thought he might hit her.
“I’ll call the police,” Lucy LeBlanc said. A muscle jumped in her jaw, letting me know she meant it.
Terry spat at her feet and walked toward the parking lot.
Jenny did not follow him, and the next time Kate came to the plate, she hit it over the fence.
*
When Kate graduated high school, they gave her four tickets to the ceremony in the gym, which was strung with crepe paper and had pomp and circumstance playing over the same tinny stereo speakers they’d used at the prom.
Jenny got a ticket, even though she and Terry had divorced two years earlier. She had crow’s feet where the gemstone had been, but she’d put herself through nursing school. She wore flat shoes and no makeup, like a nun, and she embraced me warmly when I came in almost-late, grasping my mother’s elbow and wheeling her oxygen tank behind us.
“Is Terry coming?” she asked. I shrugged.
“She drove out last month and gave him a ticket. You and I both know that’s no guarantee of anything,” I replied, helping my mother into a folding chair that squeaked as she sat down. The whoosh whoosh whoosh of the oxygen tank drove me to distraction, but I ignored it.
“She should have given it to her boyfriend,” Jenny said, thumbing through the program with mild interest. “He might have actually shown up.”
*
The fourth chair remained empty, and we all cried when Lucy LeBlanc, whose hair was now entirely gray, gave Kate her diploma.
*
Later, in the parking lot, Kate handed my camera off to a friend, and said, “Take my picture with my girls.”
A lump rose in my throat, hard and impassable, and I could not speak to tell her thank you, so I simply reached out my hand and tucked her bra strap safely back inside her gown, patted her shoulder clumsily, tried not to cry. She was taller than I was, so she put an arm around my shoulder, casual and carefree.
We all smiled for the picture, and three months later, when I put a box of extension cords and textbooks onto her front seat, it was pasted to her dashboard.
In her defense, it was a fair assumption to make. No one ever called us but my mother, and when my mother became involved in a situation, it went from a molehill to a mountain in ten seconds flat. Buying your first bra was embarrassing enough, with the saleslady measuring you and announcing “a-cup” to all the lipsticked women in the dressing room a little too loudly to be
prudent.
“I didn’t,” I shot back, picking up the phone. “Hello?”
“It’s Terry,” the voice on the other end said after a beat of silence.
My first impulse was to hang up, to announce to my daughter that it was a wrong number and
then to get rip-roaring drunk.
Instead, I said, “Yes.”
*
Terry and I dated for ten months during my second year of junior college. He played baseball and had blonde hair and dark eyes, and when I told him before his double-header against Okatoma State that I was pregnant, he said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Not we, which was the language we’d spoken for the last ten months. I no longer knew how to think in terms of I.
I left during the seventh-inning stretch, and he never called me again. When I dropped by his apartment three weeks later, his roommates, Mike and Pete, who looked embarrassed, told me that he had quit the baseball team and maybe college, too. They weren’t sure. They hadn’t seen him in Chemistry lab, but he skipped a lot of class, anyway. And besides, his old man could get
him a job on the railroad. He was just in college for some fun, y’know, Maggie.
Yes, I knew.
I finished my final exams the first week in May and drove the three hours home, to the bayou, where my mother somehow already knew.
“It’s okay,” she said. It was an unexpected mercy. My t-shirt was too tight across my stomach when she hugged me, but we both ignored it.
My father had left my mother at the altar twenty years before, and since it was a shotgun wedding to begin with, she knew all about being pregnant and alone. We shopped for baby clothes at church yard sales and she told me grimly about mastitis and thrush but said that they were worth it because formula was expensive. As if in response, my breasts leaked for the first time three weeks before the baby was born, and she nodded approvingly in K-Mart when she saw the wet circles on my shirt.
Kate was born during a thunderstorm, and the nurses all came in to look at her because she was born safely ensconced in her amniotic sac or en caul, lucky and blessed, mmhm as a Cajun nurse on the fourth floor put it.
*
“I know I didn’t do right by her,” Terry continued on the phone, as if he had not been absent for eleven years. “I’ve got a good job now, on the railroad. I want to meet her.”
Her. I wondered vaguely how he knew the baby he’d never seen was a her.
“That’ll be her choice,” I said, although I wanted to make it for her.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I can understand if she wouldn’t want to.”
He gave me a number where I -- or she, he added hopefully -- could call back later, and I hung
up the phone.
She was standing with her shirt off in the living room, plucking at her bra straps in front of the mirror. “The kids at school will definitely be able to see these through my shirt,” she said sullenly. “The saleslady said they wouldn’t, but they could see Kelly’s and her straps were smaller than mine.”
“That was your dad on the phone,” I said. In hindsight, I wished I’d chosen a more formal word: father, male parent, sperm donor.
She looked like him: light hair, dark eyes, the way her eyebrows crinkled in confusion.
“I thought he left,” she said. It wasn’t the accusation I’d hoped it would be.
“He did, but he wants to meet you.”
“Am I allowed to meet him?” she asked, the same turn of phrase she used for birthday parties and five-dollar night at the skating rink and mascara.
I tried to sound calm. “Sure, if you want to.”
“What would Grandma say?” she asked.
My own father had shown up on the porch during hurricane season the summer I turned nine, and she had chased him back out to the road, clutching a two-by-four that she’d been about to board a window with.
I had watched from the porch swing, the juice from a grape popsicle running down my fingers and onto my wrist. I had not asked about him again, but my daughter was different than my mother and I were.
“That it’s your choice,” I repeated, although I wasn’t at all sure that would be my mother’s counsel.
“Does he got a wife?” she asked, and my first impulse was to correct her grammar: does he HAVE a wife, Kate.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe I could meet her first,” she said, slipping her shirt back on. She caved her shoulders in, hiding her breasts, and it made my heart twinge.
*
I called Terry back once she’d gone to bed. He answered on the second ring, like he did when we were dating.
“Are you married?” I asked without preamble.
“Yeah,” he said, as if there were a wrong answer and he didn’t want to give it.
“Does she know about Kate?” I asked. I itched for a cigarette even though I hadn’t smoked since I found out I was pregnant a dozen years ago.
“Yeah,” he said again, the only word in his vocabulary.
“Kate said that maybe she’d meet her first.”
He exhaled, like ripping paper on the other end of the line.
“Jenny might do it.”
*
We met Jenny in Shreveport, which we had determined was exactly halfway between Terry and me. My mother rode with us, and to her credit, she didn’t tell Kate that she should think twice about doing this, even though I could read the discomfort in the creases between her eyebrows and around her mouth.
Kate was wearing overalls and a lavender shirt, and even though she’d crimped her hair, she still looked eleven.
“What if she doesn’t like me?” Kate blurted as soon as we turned into the Chi-Chi’s parking lot.
“Then you come back out to the car and we leave,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt.
“That’s right, baby,” my mother said. “You get out of there and leave her with the check.”
We all laughed, even though none of us meant it, and I watched Kate’s skinny white bra strap slip down her arm as she walked inside, head held high, shoulders still hunched.
*
Jenny was twenty -- what a sweet little rhyme -- so she obviously got along famously with my eleven year old. She walked her out to the car, and I nonsensically searched for similarities between us but couldn’t find any.
“This is Jenny,” Kate said, and I noticed she had one of those stupid little plasticine gems plastered near the corner of her left eye, which made mine twitch.
Jenny turned her face a little, and of course, she had one on, too.
“Hi,” Jenny said, sticking out her hand. Her fingernails were painted black, a color I’d never let Kate wear on her own nails, and I watched Kate notice me noticing.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
*
Kate made the high school softball team, and her first game was slated for her fifteenth birthday. It was a double-header two towns over, and Kate had told me carefully that morning that Terry would be coming.
Terry had mostly been a disappointment: no child support had ever been attached to his newfound, half-hearted interest in his daughter, and he often inexplicably scheduled weekend visits with her while he was away on the railroad. Jenny came anyway, dutifully meeting us in Shreveport on Friday nights and bringing her back on Sunday afternoons with her hair laced into
elaborate braids that I could never do for her myself, even though I had wanted to.
“That’s good,” I said, even though the lie made the toast stick in my throat.
I could feel it there, like buttered sandpaper, all day long. I mentioned it to my mother when I came home on my lunch break, and she got the pinched look around her mouth that she always had when someone broached the subject of Terry.
“The girl’s got to learn, Maggie. Let her keep trying, and let him keep saying no, and things will take care of themselves.”
*
The metal bleachers burned the backs of my thighs when I sat down, but I waved at Kate in the dugout like I hadn’t noticed. She slipped out her black plastic mouthguard and mouthed, “Where is Terry?”
She didn’t call him “Dad,” yet, which felt like a mercy. I shrugged.
An expression I couldn’t read passed over her face, and she put the mouthguard back in.
It was the bottom of the second when Terry and Jenny made their way into the ballpark. I could tell even from the stands that he was drunk and that Jenny was embarrassed, and I felt my spine stiffen in response, like a cat who’s seen an enemy.
My mother swore under her breath and reached over to pat my knee. The back of her hand was bruised from all the blood they’d drawn to find the source of her mysterious cough, even though I was afraid I already knew.
It was Kate’s turn to bat when they made it into the bleachers, and when he heard her name over the loudspeakers, he let out an unintelligible but very loud cheer.
Kate’s shoulders squared, and I knew she’d heard. She had so much that she felt that she had to prove. I squeezed my eyes shut.
A swing and a miss.
“‘Salright, baby,” Terry yelled, and Jenny looked up at me, as if to apologize.
I could not meet her eyes, and I watched another pitch sail by. The umpire called it a ball, as was only true and fair, and Terry shouted again. The umpire turned his head, as if to warn him, and Kate swung at a pitch that was nearly in the dirt.
I felt sick, just wanted her to strike out so that the misery could end and felt immediately guilty for wishing it.
Terry swore, a word not usually said at all in a mostly-Catholic parish in south Louisiana, much less shouted at a ball field, and the principal leapt up like a shot from her lawn chair.
I’d gone to high school with Lucy LeBlanc. She’d graduated from the same junior college I had, but after we got our diplomas, she went on to the state school for a teaching degree while I used cocoa butter to prevent stretch marks.
It hadn’t worked out for either of us. My stomach was creased with white and purple lines, and her hair was streaked with gray from the decade and a half she’d spent with high schoolers.
“Sir, you’re going to have to leave,” she said, gesturing to the parking lot with her thumb.
“‘M not goin’ anywhere,” he said, swaying on the spot. I looked past him, watched Kate strike out and walk back to the dugout, her cheeks flame-red.
“Yes, you are,” Jenny said, grabbing his elbow.
He jerked away, and for a terrible moment, I thought he might hit her.
“I’ll call the police,” Lucy LeBlanc said. A muscle jumped in her jaw, letting me know she meant it.
Terry spat at her feet and walked toward the parking lot.
Jenny did not follow him, and the next time Kate came to the plate, she hit it over the fence.
*
When Kate graduated high school, they gave her four tickets to the ceremony in the gym, which was strung with crepe paper and had pomp and circumstance playing over the same tinny stereo speakers they’d used at the prom.
Jenny got a ticket, even though she and Terry had divorced two years earlier. She had crow’s feet where the gemstone had been, but she’d put herself through nursing school. She wore flat shoes and no makeup, like a nun, and she embraced me warmly when I came in almost-late, grasping my mother’s elbow and wheeling her oxygen tank behind us.
“Is Terry coming?” she asked. I shrugged.
“She drove out last month and gave him a ticket. You and I both know that’s no guarantee of anything,” I replied, helping my mother into a folding chair that squeaked as she sat down. The whoosh whoosh whoosh of the oxygen tank drove me to distraction, but I ignored it.
“She should have given it to her boyfriend,” Jenny said, thumbing through the program with mild interest. “He might have actually shown up.”
*
The fourth chair remained empty, and we all cried when Lucy LeBlanc, whose hair was now entirely gray, gave Kate her diploma.
*
Later, in the parking lot, Kate handed my camera off to a friend, and said, “Take my picture with my girls.”
A lump rose in my throat, hard and impassable, and I could not speak to tell her thank you, so I simply reached out my hand and tucked her bra strap safely back inside her gown, patted her shoulder clumsily, tried not to cry. She was taller than I was, so she put an arm around my shoulder, casual and carefree.
We all smiled for the picture, and three months later, when I put a box of extension cords and textbooks onto her front seat, it was pasted to her dashboard.
(Appal)Trad
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"My Big Brother"
Linda Hudson Hoagland, Virginia Sharp was not a word to describe Terry.
He was a bully, hard to get along with, and unfriendly. With that said, I don’t want you to say anything bad about him. He struggled through life for seventy three years alone, most of the time, of his own choosing. I miss my big brother. |
(Avant)Serial
Avant(Serial): a section dedicated to publishing a novel by chapters in much the same way as novels were published in Dicken's day. Each is(sue) will feature a chapter of an exciting experimental novel - one chapter per is(sue) until the entire novel is thus published. Avant(Serial) will not accept unsolicited manuscripts by submission. Serialised novels in this space will be chosen by joint agreement of all AvantAppal(achia) ed(itors) and will not be Arch(ived). See Sub(missions) for more information.
"Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection"
a novel by Jim Meirose, New Jersey
Chapter 6 – Eight Years In: Second Check-in at Bern
a novel by Jim Meirose, New Jersey
Chapter 6 – Eight Years In: Second Check-in at Bern
Shopping cart rattling down buffed up shiny floored aisle in great big greatest of all toy store in this brand new state of the art wired up and wireless you take your pick shopping complex. Leave for Bern in three more days. Eight years in. Janie eight; just snapped from seven, but no discernable behavior changes. The left front wheel is rattling, the cart is not too easy to push and here and there the steel is rusty. Now, if this store is brand new which it is and the carts were all brand new a week ago when the consumer cash sucking complex was opened, why are the carts all beat up like this? Why indeed. This really nagged at me Jamed, it kind of seeped in and plugged in and—yes, yes—it was just like some Claymation monster was slowly formed before me and each rattle of the wheel was a command to the monster to throw out a tendril, and plug it deftly into and down deep to the bottom of a pore in my cheek. The wheel rattled and rattled so fast that I finally stopped, because the thicket of twisted tangled writhing tendrils had popped out and plugged in my face and became too thick and bulky and uncomfortable that I had to stop the cart which stopped the wheel rattling which dried up the mass of twisted tendrils and they unplugged from my face and dissolved into thin pink dust all gone even before they were able to land at my feet and mar the perfect nearly new, precisely laid, buffed, swept and polished ceramic very ceramic yes ceramic, flooring; the most expensive materials and workmanship spun up all around; the entire complex smelled of the smell of brand-new top-notch building materials knocked nailed and built together to make the great store that had come in and over and around me and stopped me dead in the toy section devoted to children seven to nine and since Janie is eight, it is the exactly right spot to release the cart handles and slowly take in the items their prices and even maybe to find out that there are some slashes of prices and here and there an item marked down in some deep discount. Yes, let me see look see what look you--
Can I help you ma’am?
Oh! Turn no turn yes there’s a sweet-faced store-boy of about twenty or around that spiral of ages that range yes see I am a judge of age ought to have taken up guessing ages and weights and all, on the boardwalk for several consecutive summers in a row, developing several consecutive suntans and here and there some very mild twinge-spots akin to real sunburn and--
Ma’am? Can I help you? You looking for toys? Is this the right age group? Or can I show you to another section? Tell me what exactly you are looking for, and I will find it for you.
Oh, yes—I said through my jagged fingertips pressed to the plastic and steel cool of the defective shopping carts push handle—Me and my husband and our eight year old Janie are taking a trip to Switzerland week after next, and I want to surprise Janie with some neat new toys to bring along on the flight and also to play with after Ma comes home and then we can get up and go, could even sleep a while in the plane if Janie is busy making little friends attracting them with her neat toys as would some old-school ventriloquist midget of two or three or five days in a row outside laying food traps all rotten and stenchy with maggots hatching and knowing like I do that poor greedy creatures of all kinds will come and grasp and feel, Wow what a sky above and what slimy skunk cabbage below but our parents you know were too careless with climbing their rapidly dissolving to vapor corporate stepladders, to think to plan and do an assessment of anything they were too busy to snag down away from the great thick heavy crushing tsunami of a continuous eternity of their pseudo-futures pouring out now and then back to the wide astonished but unaffected face of the store-boy who had asked if I needed help because, as always in bustling places like this, I stood alone frozen lost and forlorn—having thusly thought his question over, I said to him, Yes, what do you recommend? Toys for five to eight days, some in close quarters like a plane seat or waiting room standing to the side forest green tall garbage cans in the office we need to stop by and visit for a few which is okay because I really am supposed to be in the office now, anyway but this needs to get done get done yes get done now! So—can you help?
Oh, yes, no problem ma’am. Let me pull a few items from the shelf. Here.
He moved as a long thin slippery lizard and pulled down a very minor tiny imperceptible slide of colorful small toys in boxes and bags each of which I look at I cannot understand what you do with each one but it seems like kids today are you know they’re—hey! What are these?
Those? Oh. Those are Koosh balls.
Huh?
Koosh balls. Kids love them—and see, you spotted them in the bargain bin, everything in there is buy one get two free. See there?
What? Oh—yeah. I see that. What do kids do with these?
Play catch, pretty much.
Huh? He stood waiting to get an answer but the answer would have to be, God, that is ridiculous you can’t play catch to keep busy on a plane where once in a while they’ll let Janie play in the aisle but where most of the time she’ll be between me and Jamed, plus so what they’re soft and all that, number one; you can’t play catch good with less than a solid hard ball, and, number two; so what they’re soft and won’t hurt anybody they go off course go askew from a bad throw or whatever, nobody in a cramped airplane on an intercontinental flight will take kindly to being pummeled at random intervals by a featherweight yucky little wisp of a ball, no matter how cute the players, because on a long flight everything around everybody turns black-hearted ugly shitty and raw--
What about it, ma’am? Like the Koosh balls?
Not sure, spit from my lips, as the final and worse problem with playing ball in tight crowded spaces full of bad air and bad vibes broke all surf-like and foamy, obliterating the store-boy fully, erasing his fairly unimportant question, flowed down and down showing its reason for having appeared to me; yes, it needed to come and tell me, curving down before me like a scroll, upon which words came in great black block letters, yelling up into my face there is one more problem about playing catch for air travel amusement, that being that it assumes you have friends to play with; and no, yes, we don’t know for sure if we will; it’s a not too much of a logical stretch to think her happy manner, brand new toys, and the smiles of her obviously regularly bathed parents, yes her parents, in the real world outside this loopy thought-stream being me and Jamed, will go out of our way to coo and ahh and grin and nod and make the other parents crammed in on the plane sure that their prayers have been answered and here is a way to get a break from the twenty four seven strain of minding unruly children, yes, unruly and slow to learn like unsocialized young adult dogs, a strain to train indeed, and the strain varying by breed and it’s not like choosing a breed at the shelter since people-breeds come out and what you get is the deck you’re dealt, it’s like saying at the pound to the pound people give me a dog any dog any age my eyes are closed I will conceive this child and take the roll of the dice, even though if the possibility exists that I may receive a dog too large too evil non-housebreakable stinky drooling noisy super-shedding hard-to-handle and no good actually at all. Is not conceiving all the new humans like a Russian roulette spin? Here, we put one in the chamber; go on and spin and spin and point to your head and click the orgasmic trigger and hang on through what seems the eternal nine-month wait to see if your head blows off being given a child with the genes of a serial killer, or with the hollow click and the pee-in-your-pants relief that you will give birth to a smart honest healthy trainable maybe even already trained blasted from Zeus’ blood-splattering forehead as-goddess style fully formed and perfectly perfect Athena-like ball of effortless and perfect and no work at all, child—you know—the couple in the seat two rows back on the other side of the plane will nod to their perfectly trained Jesus-like superclean in body and mind, child fit to play with Janie, wow how great; to come over to play.
Or maybe not. You can’t tell a serial killer at first sight. Love at first sight doesn’t work out, either. Haste makes waste and all that too. The answer is given. The store comes back from the surrounding pondering hard-thinking mist, and I tell the slithery-slick super-skinny store-boy if I’ll go on and buy the Koosh balls, without looking at his gleaming white shirt whiter than white he looks like he is standing at the superhot focal point of the world’s largest new BrightSource solar power plant in California’s Mojave Desert that burns birds down from the sky like some god-da*ned real life world war two last resort super-secret Nazi death ray—sure look it up if you don’t think that’s true, look it us yes up and yes up yes—then for some reason, everything went scalding hot and I recoiled and saw the store-boy again, and ran for safety in the cool gap between us throwing out words to grapple the cool back and over and around me, to survive. I listened to what I found myself saying as the scalding peeled away layer on layer cooling down and down remove the deadly power plant immediately if not sooner please--
No, I don’t think that’s what I want. I’m sorry.
Oh?
Right—but what else would you recommend?
Oh, yes, well then right here right here yes here it is yes, wait.
He grabbed out into the blur around us, and brought out a hazy item somehow really thickly hazed over, like people in a true-to-life COPS show get their faces blurred because they are unwilling to be identified for some paranoid reason, it was not definable until a fat surf of words foamed all splashy out over the blur and made it so any footprints in the sand could be seen clearly at the beach, at least until the next wave foamed out over to erase them all—I said the name of the thing in his hand quick, before it would be washed away and be gone, never was, forever.
Ah, Playdoh. That’s Playdoh. I see. Yeah, that’s a good idea—Playdoh. Only thing is, are you sure that’s not too young for an eight-year-old?
Oh, no. It would be fine. And also--
What also?
Also, studies have shown it will occupy a child on a plane for at least forty minutes.
Studies?
Right.
Okay, wait a second, let me think; Sure, take your time; I blinked away and pictured little Janie sitting in a cramped airliner seat with a postage stamp sized tray table folded down before her, puzzled as how to get lost in Playdoh-play on a surface almost as small as a three by five index card, but my hand went to my face and tilted down, smacking me silly with the sudden sight of a stain in the linoleum floor at the tip of the store-boy’s pointy shiny loafers, this stain being shaped roughly like the state of Texas; any thought of how Janie would handle the Playdoh sank onto and into and past the stain until it was gone—the stain was the important thing; one does not see this kind of thing every day; but, roughly the shape of Texas is not good enough, no—as somewhere in a pitch-black compartment way back in a corner of my brain, little Janie continued struggling to play correctly with a dozen round containers of Playdoh, that once the Doh was removed from them, there was nowhere to put them aside to make way for the Play with the actual Doh, without them rolling away toward a fall to the floor followed by a quick sharp roll under the airplane seats. Remember, round smooth cumbersome children’s toy items have embedded in their DNA the instinct to not stay where they are put, to always strive for an excuse to fall over, roll away, and drop off the play surface—just as surely as someone with skill and taste and time and tools would have to get down and define underline outline and boldface the stain on the toy store floor, in an effort to make it into a perfect tiny Texas, so that not just I, who has been solely quite focused on the stain for nearly a full minute now, would see; like the pain in my belly from trying to squeeze down to reach a dropped object beneath an airline seat with no legroom to begin with and with a seat belt strapped on because round plastic children’s toy items strive always when rolling to come to rest in some jet-black place where it would be an extremely difficult effort to bent down twist around grunt and groan to retrieve them, and—sure enough it hits me again and again like a jackhammer of dismay that Texas being an interesting scuff-stain in the floor when it’s only nearly shaped that way, is not true at all. The stain yelled at my face, No, yes, pay attention, I have a purpose, yes, I do, yes, I do, I must be known I must be noticed—I must be more a really sharp Texas one glance at me should spear them with Texas—must try to get it where did they roll all but one rolled ugh must bend down pain pain—I need to catch my breath, and I straightened to see a sweating fat bald man’s face above the seatback that said, Ma’am, could your child play with something else? I did not buy a ticket to have little girl’s playthings rolling under hitting my feet and taking my legroom—droplets flew off from his quivering cheeks, I had never seen anyone sweat so much, but it must be made so that every person passing by the stain growing from the airplane’s complaining fat man slinging down his impure string of pearly sweatdrips spattering the floor, who knows what Texas looks like on a map, would stop and gape and get hit with a club in the mouth to say, Hey! That stain equals Texas! Sure, see there, I was right! That’s over, very good. Yes—and I say back, I am glad you agree; the little cheap Playdoh jars are open and Janie’s smallish but nicely tapering hands worked the dough into some unrecognizably unique shape she had in mind, and—the uneasy need to doublecheck something pushed my hand down an inch from my face again, and up came Texas. Texas! I was testing the concept, and yes; it’s Texas yes, it is yes. It. Is. Woof!
But, Ma’am, excuse me please, could your child play with something else?
Ma’am, please answer, could your child play with something else?
Ma’am, I am being nice, I must ask again. Could your child play with something else?
Well, Ma’am? What do you think. Want the Playdoh?
Ma’am, could your child please play with something else? If you don’t answer I will ring the stewardess!
What? Who? I, uh, no. No. No was the safest answer when the last thirty seconds or so of pondering the answer cannot be remembered and thus must be thought over again to make sure, is, in the interim, as I finally stated quite crisply and clearly, No.
Why not? said the store-boy. I’m curious to know?
Ma’am, did I hear you right, you told me no? Answer now!
Because it’s messy. Goes all over. Plus, there’s not enough space on a seatback fold-down tray on a cramped no-legroom plane to really be able to let loose and play right. And there’s more I knew but just because I can’t remember what it was doesn’t mean it isn’t true I wish I could tell you, but—the reasons exist. I just don’t know what they are. Understand?
Not really, said the young gleaming store-boy, but that’s okay. There’s more ideas I have for you. Just wait a second. There’s something back here.
He twisted and reached displaying a huge underarm sweat-stain for the first time, but though I used to think him clean, something somewhere that I’ve also forgotten makes me unsurprised that he is really quite unclean. He’s very good at hiding it; he had me fooled good, ‘till now. He repositioned the Playdoh box on the shelf with the other dozen or so, then somehow on a lower level his quick hand transformed the Playdoh box into another box of an entirely different color shape and size which when pulled up said really big across the side, Lego; which I then repeated aloud, yes thusly; Legos? That’s great. That’s perfect. I think I’ll definitely buy that. Sure, why not. Everybody’s okay with Legos. I’m too worn out, it’s already a long day, sure what the h*ll; I’ll take them. What else you got? I need a lot more by the end of the day.
Oh, there’s plenty more. I’ll pick out more things like that. But, I can see you’re tired. Go rest a bit at that desk over there where all that paperwork’s spread. Nobody’s going to use it today, you can sit there nobody’s going to say it’s wrong so stay there and take a breather. Let me shop for you for a little bit. But first, tell me. How long is your flight? You need enough toys to keep your daughter busy through the whole flight. How long is it?
It’s about ten or eleven hours.
Great—so you’ll need four or five playsets to make it through. You okay to buy that many? It will probably wind up costing between almost a hundred dollars, but definitely no more than that. That sound all right?
Oh, sure, I said.
Great! he snapped, so loud hard and fast it hit the wall across the room, splatted over all and everything, and recoiled him spinning away to find toys for my child. He was trying so hard to impress me; he obviously cared for the wellbeing in the airplane tomorrow of my sweet child Janie, so I sat at the desk he’d pointed out and laid my head gently down on my arms folded down on the desk. The cushion pushed under me pressed up and out and all around saying Lord, God, Wendy Wendy dear little one, you are so worn out. You need to get some sleep tonight before tomorrow comes all hot tight flamed up super-hotly or worse, all horribly dreadful, swallowing us gone in one earsplitting Rolls-Royce powered fastgulp of a planeride, carrying us now forward to tomorrow in and about the people mover warship that had fired and fired and ultimately worn the sh*t out of me here in the store all hollow like I am. Sheeee*t. Probably thoughts of the long dreadful day tomorrow that’s doomed for quick swallowing by the horrid creepy greedy signed and sealed trip to Bern Switzerland we’re being forced to undertake. It’ll be Hot. It’ll be Sticky. Smelly. Sh*tty. And it’s only necessary because we paid tons of money to ensure that we’ll be euthanized at age fifty-nine, on a gamble that by then we’ll be able to be revived and live a whole ‘nother life and et cetera in a very extreme sense. What a h*ll of a plot! Plus, little Janie will get euthanized and revived for free. What deal, my sweet dear, can top that? I had cold feet sure, I told Jamed a couple of times let’s quit, let’s cancel, let’s knock off the whole dopey thing. I told him before we left for the first trip to Bern, and I told him after the sh*tty knock-knock kind of trip and visit and trip back with nothing at all that makes sense accomplished that I could see anyhow anyway that we ended up having; but Jamed just told me have faith, hang in there, we’re together and fully committed. We need to be bigger than the lives we’ve been dealt. What’s bigger than living forever? Nodding and looking away like I did, told me that telling him yes would end up way easier than to argue. But the trips to Bern every ten years or so, to maintain our membership, will be more and more exhausting. Yes, my head leaned on my hand, whose elbow leaned out of the desk that held a great big sink to wash up in after this next long Journey that somehow I can’t remember because it hasn’t happened yet, but I know that the store-boy is working hard to make sure Janie is occupied through the whole trip and that much at least, will be covered. That will calm us a bit and we’ll probably nap and get there wide awake and freshened up; and, just like the first trip, we are required by contract to go to the Resurrection club’s headquarters to sign whatever needed to be signed immediately, without any delay. It’s a stupid rule and who knows why, but that’s what they want. Go immediately upon arrival or they’ll dump us, we were told. So, after checking into the hotel we arranged for their free babysitting service, because Janie at least must go to bed immediately because she’s totally conked-out from the flight during which the toys we bought were totally right and absolutely exceeded our expectations. God bless that store-boy the other day; thank God I went to that store, which I considered avoiding because its name contains words evocative of those involved in my lifelong battle with onomatophobia; we tucked Janie in and waited for the sitter, who turned out to be an extremely small pale extremely old person, who could have passed for either male or female, whose face was no more than a mass of deep wrinkles and who wore a shiny jet-black beehive rock-hard hairdo wig that smelled faintly of mothballs and looked as old as the sitter itself. The sitter just came in and said nothing and glided somehow not really walked to an easy chair against the far wall, and sat and pulled out a great black book and opened it, and said, I will just sit here and entertain myself. You two kids have fun; and a smile or perhaps more like a flicker of a smile-shape pushed out its wrinkles, glowed at us, reached us and was perceived by us, and then was gone. Then it seems some massive plates in the geology of reality shifted several yards at once, because she finished her sentence saying, What about Loom Bands? These are very popular this year. Price is only sixteen dollars. Like these?
All right, I said—who knew why but I said all right and rushed Jamed ahead out of the room into the nice fresh hall, and down the elegant old-school elevator, brought up to modern code as the whole world-famous Bellevue Palace hotel has been, from peak of its fashionably slightly crooked and very honestly antique lightning rods to the richly fossilized bedrock its colossal foundations rest on. We went across the gleaming marble floored and walled and ceilinged lobby, vast and airy as brand new but actually very, very, very antique like a body stretched on an embalming table waiting to die so it will finally be where it belongs but we didn’t pause we rushed out to the street, and were hit by old Bern, just like last time, which Jamed had explained that nothing was strafed bombed incinerated or fire-stormed to less than ash here, because Switzerland was neutral, which actually seemed to just have said because somehow this new trip is our last trip at the same time, joining the Club de la Resurrection, which is to enable immortality, has made us both grow to see what immortality really means in a loopy sort of wild nonsensical way, hah, that being that all time past and future is really just one time that’s around us all the time and for things to make sense to our backward limited minds, the notion of time was created to prevent mass insanity of the entire race—and—Jamed yelled look, look, I turned, he was paused and pointing.
What? I said—he stood smiling beside a tall old Kiosk ragged with obsolete faded and tattered notices of gatherings and functions long gone to the fading past. He said, look here, there’s some information posted up here about what tourists should make sure not to miss in Bern. Let’s stop and give it a look. We ought to get to know the place a little. After all we’ll be coming here three of four more times. Check it out.
I scuffed up and pretended to read the tourist information, though I was much too tired from the flight, and the final check in here for euthanization won’t be before we’re nearly sixty. Lord, God, that’s so far away. It’s like so unreal. Like the cadaverous icy cheesy dead meat-people we process through the joint we run to get money to stay alive. It’s unreal, actually to do what we do. But if you do it long enough, it becomes real. But, it will take until our final moments on our deathbeds to really see how real it all is, but; then it will be too late, no way can we know what life can be when it’s all really real to us; mortal, when it’s over we just get slid in a hole and that’s that, might as well not even have lived, but—immortal, you get to start over after revivement, I mean, hold it let’s stop here, I got a problem. I’m sensitive to words. The way they sound when heard, the way they taste when spoken. Words you don’t say ever in your whole life probably. Like revivement. Revivement is not a medical procedure performed to clean up a wound when a ghastly gash of an injury is all muddy full of stones or a degloving thing. The proper word there is debridement. It’s also not to be mistaken for deployment dismemberment development environment unemployment establishment et cetera go et cetera, no, that that washed up music guy whose name sounds like sounds like sounds like sound here comes the deeptanned wideshouldered lifeguard to save us from continuing to the inevitable end. The lifeguard grips us and drags us to some shady place where we’re handed by who knows who what does it matter who saves your life anyway, uh—the lifeguard becomes a gang of the same their job is to save it’s legal that they stop you first and it’s legal we demolish anything and everything that might distract you like any landmarks either ancient or new that contribute to the fact that the old town in Bern was listed amongst the five hundred UNESCO world cultural heritage sites in nineteen eighty three. Now, here’s what’s wrong; the heritage site title was given to the neighborhood around the same time the Patriciosilva dental practice we walked to will walk to have walked to all at the same time, was given the clean mouth clean mind award by a large-scale jury of Patricio’s peers most whom are now in cemeteries and not just any old cemetery, no—but why was Jamed into saying in some different voice, Usborn Activity Cards! She will love these! Only eighteen fifty-six. What about it?
His eyes pulled out an answer that I recognized after initial confusion as coming from myself, that was, Yes, that is great; and I know it came from me, yes, because the eyes also rang in my head saying, Humor me, humor me, I’ve done so much for you Wendy, the least you can do is humor me—I had yes I had, but being dog-tired almost in a trance, I had to ride this out stay on track, like; it’s about bigwigs being laid down in not just any old cemeteries no, but only in expensive ritzy big cemeteries because these were top-notch high-income old-money world-class dentists who truly lived the job and were never handed a fucking thing in their lives—so unlike me and Jamed who had the Davis Funeral home silver spoon jammed so far down our throats that our gagging has grown to be less troublesome through the years since but still attacks with a vengeance but subtly so sneakily stealthily it times itself to when we accidentally open the densely packed bowels of this or that fat-fed corpse who’s really pissed inside at being abruptly demoted from being way out all alive and on top, to a corpse cold and naked on a frigid stainless steel slab—such corpses eject mass quantities of poop stained gas flush flush spray peppered with moist flecks all around spattered out good and thoroughly; yes it is at such times that the gag is thrust up from all the rotten sh*t deep down below the dark which is the corpse, to remind us that this is no way the best way to make a living, there’s other stuff, but; it’s late I think I need to sleep now yes no yes see yes wins I must rise seek out a salad to shove in followed by a dozen frosty cold bottles of Poland Spring bottled spring water, chosen because years back that the rumor was that Evian water was not spring at all but was manufactured from a blend of acidic suds and slop cream and the leavings of those we’ll never know actually because things that stop fall back in time more quickly than we can hold our attention on them straining to read whatever passes for their label until they’re too far back to be heard any more. A thirty-year fold back of the warp and woof of time like that well I, myself—could never remember what theme song to pick as commemoration so no music will be played in honor of these brave men and women and this is why they’re all forgotten today; yes, something as simple as the malt shop juke box not being properly updated by the vendor firm whose name old Ted forgot anyway, so he said to himself what he dared not say aloud—I don’t really give a f*ck sh*t hey, hey. The past’s so gone it’s really never was. Hic, hey, we got there fine. Go in is what’s generally done when one gets there unless it’s a corporate picnic in which case some stuffy-nosed worm sneaks you in all the way in yes under the ex-big top’s cheap-deal rental-tent, and you’re in. And nobody even noticed you’re nude from the waist down—hey, no, only kidding—made you look! Hah, anyway, here we’re in and there she is with time to spare but somehow weird it’s not we just got here it’s like we never left the first time and this is generally cause for alarm because some kind of top secret hypnotism may be at work here yes, no, Hey! But lord God I slept all through reading the Kiosk and walking the short twilight walk to 1 Kochergasse, and the entry into the Patriciosilva dental office and the step up to the check-in window, waving and flapping and grunting and groaning our step by step way through the thick super-clean unnatural dental office air as the last time we came ten years or so back. The air’s a drug to slow us down the rewinding time slide we’re into backwards is how it’s explained in the Resurrection Club’s boilerplate literature, and there we stood again bellied up to the receptionist tapped the window and the receptionist’s face rose again out of her still jet-black hair and it’s the same woman the same age it seems as last time, saying, okay, decided to come back, did you—did you go to get paper and pen I told you, you need? I hope you got it this time, I truly do indeed! Got paper and pen paper and pen ah yes! I really and truly hope you do indeed! Ah, yes, I—I thought you were leaving—what else do you need? I remember thinking you needed pen and paper before you signed the signature sheet. But you already signed the signature sheet good that is great—oh yes and here, check this over, Ma’am. A magnetic travel game. She’ll love it! Only eleven dollars. This one okay? Hey hey—seems like it should be. When you wake up let me know.
Just a blip it was in my head, probably from fatigue, I snapped, Sure, but that one word drowned dissolving under Jamed’s wide open firehose shotgun-spray of words.
Hold it, wait, slow down. We didn’t sign any sheet for today. What are you talking about?
Oh yes, Mister Davis, I’m afraid you did. Look—look, here—see?
The large frog green binder slapped up from the dark wide open and she pointed to one of the lines and said, See here sir, it’s signed. Yes, it is—I told you.
Wait, sniped Jamed. That must be the one we signed on our first visit—what’s the date look at the date, here—and, leaning forward, he pushed his finger toward hers, more than a push, actually a jab, more than a jab, actually a stab; and he must have been sorry to have reacted so roughly, because he seemed to come to somehow like he’d been in a trance but he’d not been in one so I did not understand. No, he said. That’s not what we signed before. That’s today’s date. Where is the one from last time, but—hey! Why is the one with today’s date signed?
Because you just signed it before, before you started to leave. I saw you.
No! Who signed for us? An imposter was here pretending to be us! Who was it? Where did they—wait, how many were here? Two like me and Wendy are now? Or, a variable quantity not greater than one thousand but not less than one? Not less than one because people-presence cannot be counted negative. A negative number of people would be—well—quite abnormal. Did you know that see I know that—as I say, what you’re saying is absolutely abnormal.
My foot shuffled over. Some kind of different Jamed had spoken. I stepped back as he waited for the receptionist to reply, breathing quite heavily; I thought of agonal breathing; years back I heard agonal breathing for the first and only time, when at two a.m. we got a call that a client’s father had just passed down at Wildwood hospital. Wildwood hospital did everything in the hospice ward for free. That is because more than one hundred years ago, the founder, the Very Reverend Monsignor Henry S. Wildwood, a renowned Jesuit, and a larger cross-time thinker and imagineer than any others in the order, which is saying a lot, decided that the homeless and otherwise poor, should no longer pass on in alleys full of garbage cans, or in abandoned cars beside abandoned Victorians, which virtually litter the deserted streets of the rough tough bottom-side of this county’s biggest urban center, but--
Excuse me, said the receptionist around past Jamed. Mrs. Davis? Mrs. Davis, there’s a phone call for you. It’s Dr. Patriciosilva. Here—oh she did push a telephone into the edge of my perception. But who would be calling me here? It made no sense so I went on all about the story of what happened in the hospice unit down at Wildwood. We got to the hospital only to find that the loved one we’d been called to take had not passed yet. God had made him seem dead but had given him a five-hour reprieve, and--
Mrs. Davis, please! Take this phone! It’s Dr. Patriciosilva and it’s urgent. Mrs. Davis, what is wrong. Can’t you hear me?
—the telephone started rattling very hard now in the envelope of my sealed off fatigued airspace but not enough to not finish what I am saying which is, to get right to the point, that we arrived way too soon and we waited around because the nurses said he had probably less time to live than it would take us to go back to the funeral parlor, and then turn around and come back again. We stayed and waited and then we watched the man die. It was fairly quiet and peaceful most of the time probably due to the full-throttle end-times old folks’ Morphine drip, but at the end we witnessed around fifteen minutes of agonal breathing. Ask Jamed, that’s where he learned to do agonal breathing yes Ma yes Pa that’s what he is doing now working this signature sheet issue that’s it he’s trying to make her think she is killing him maybe with her lies or maybe a combination of lies and brute ignorance, he is doing it, he manipulates some of the casket company salesmen that way—what do I think? Here’s what I think; I think that dying man who passed with us present, let go his spirit and on its way to the pearly gates it paused because its appointment with Saint Peter was not for another hour and it’s—what? Dear God no. Now she’s stuck her head in my space saying some nonsense like, Look, this is perfect—A toy Aquadoodle. Quite the rage right now. Only sixteen and a half dollars. How about this?
Da*ned stubborn subhuman flash-hole masquerading as a harmless store-boy—so stubborn oh stubborn much too stubborn—I humored her with a yes that had already proved to dissolve that nonsense a few times, where was I yes it is always rude to arrive at a party of any kind way too early, because the hosts are not yet ready the dogs are not kenneled the children are not at the babysitter’s just like Peter Pater’s snot ready to see this man’s spirit soul so it swooped through Jamed, wound up tight some secret spring in his brain that has waited all these years all real tight and ready to let go, until this day when it got triggered and it send him on a modified path grew him up a slice sure injected him with old fart juice of the male variety, and is now powering him to repeat over and over to the receptionist, Who signed this? I demand to know! Do you know who we are, Miss? Do you?
Yes, I do sir, but wait, just wait—Mrs. Davis, please listen! Last chance, take the phone, it is the doctor who is second only to the Great Founder in the Resurrection Club. His time is precious, you are wasting his time! Take it now!
Wait no! I asked you a question, yelled Jamed, but I pushed my hand out in front of him, grabbed the phone, yelled back to her, Jesus, Jeez, don’t yell, you don’t have to push it out in my face like that, here hand it over here, right here, yes, yes—all right, here I am. What is the problem?
Mrs. Davis? This is Mrs. Jamed Davis? Is it--
Lady, listen, yelled Jamed behind me, blasting out loud to the Receptionist. Don’t be stupid, the question is simple! Who signed this? Tell me now!
I turned away, took a step, and said into the phone, Yes, I am Mrs. Davis—but please speak up, my husband is talking really loud to your receptionist about a big problem we just ran into, maybe you should come out and fix it, it’s the important thing right now.
No! Block it out! Now! You and I are what’s important right now!
What? Listen, there’s a problem out here, do something! My husband is very upset! If he gets sick, I swear to God, you and your staff will pay.
Mrs. Davis, I’m sorry but your husband is on his own right now. If you mention this problem one more time, or you tell me to speak up one more time, you will both be denied membership in the Resurrection Club, and the money you have paid so far toward your membership will never be refunded. Since we are in Switzerland, you will find it difficult if not impossible to afford winning a long-drawn-out court case to get your money back. Do you understand? Take a deep breath before you answer. There is nothing else in the universe while we are on the phone, but your voice and intellect, and my voice and intellect. Is that clear? You are just a single hairsbreadth away from being denied eternal life. Are you clear? Or do you wish that the two of you should be condemned to death, with no return or possibility of parole?
My hand clapped to my free ear to shut off Jamed, and what, yes, a gulp a large gulp too large much too large spit the da*ned thing out yes you understand say it gag choke on it but do it—spit! The word condemned definitely got my attention.
Yes, came from me calmly—it is clear.
Then seconds tick forward one by one, quiet, too quiet so quiet oh no—did I say the right thing will I live forever will Jamed and our baby little Janie too or have I fucked up really dark scary and final, God the answer please the answer I can take it oh God, here he is, quiet listen lives are at stake—here he comes, I am ready it, won’t be good no it won’t call me silly but it feels like the feeling before mounting a scale during a diet—all right, here it comes it comes, step, go on I am focused tight yes quite tight so, tell me what I’ve gained I can take it--
Good, he said warmly. I am glad we are on the same wavelength now. It is happy for your whole family that we are. Believe me.
Doctor, I was scared to death! I blurted, waving aside the sudden flood of light. To death!
All right Wendy. That’s all in the past, calm down now. I will now teach you. Listen. Are you listening? The lesson is simple. It is just eight words. Here it is—ready?
Yes—here the surf once more though foamed over yelling oh no yelling, Finger Puppets! Look at this, Ma’am. Perfect for the plane, and only fifteen dollars. We’re up to seventy-seven dollars if you want this too Ma’am. How about it—fine, but go away, you have been humored no not now go not now, tell him—thank God, he’s still waiting its quiet yell to the quiet oh--
Yes, I am ready.
In the forever life, it is always now. Say it back.
In the forever life, it is always now.
All right Wendy. Now we are level and connected. Listen; what has gone on up to now upon your arrival here, is all carefully scripted. Today we are beginning the final test of your husband to make sure he is suitable for the gift of eternal life.
Testing? What kind of testing? You’ve got him all pissed off. That’s all I see.
That is what it might seem like I know, but our methods are tried and proven. We must test and test and test again, because immortality laid on the wrong people can lead to a complete mental breakdown and the need for permanent euthanasia. If this is going to happen it will be two or three lifetimes down the road that the breakdown will occur. We are beginning a long-term test of your husband to see how much stress he can absorb over time. He will be almost constantly angry, frustrated, and depressed for the rest of his present iteration of life. If he does not break down before you both report for termination at the end of the whole process we’re leading you through, he will be judged acceptable to be gifted with immortality. Now. Do you have any questions at this point?
I—uh, no—oh wait; yes, I do. In other words, you are saying that you intend to pile enough stress upon Jamed to see if he’ll go nuts or not?
That is exactly correct. Why did you choose this as a question?
It’s really going to be hard to watch him go through this. Really hard. But, I’m glad you told me I will help him through all the stress and strain, I will help him to know he is only being tested. I know I can help him through it that way.
No! No. Absolutely not!
What? Absolutely not what, exactly?
You will not tell him that we told you this, and no matter how great his suffering might be, you must never give in to the mounting pressure to cry out to us that we should stop, back off him, we need to stop, or anything like that. And, if you tell him about this information you are being given now, both of you will end up in Hell and have your eternal futures shut down in an irrevocable way. This is your test. You’re both being tested. Your test is if you will be able to see Mr. Davis enduring Hell on Earth until the day you both die, without noticing it, speaking of it, or breaking down and giving up and pleading for us to stop it. You must project the perfect image of the better you than me uncaring ice cold jackass. Again—now that you have been told the whole plan—what questions before you’re released from this phone call? You’ve a right to have questions you know. Go on. There’s no time limit.
I—is this really going to go on for the rest of our lives?
I already told you, yes.
I really don’t know if I can do this. It’s really much too hard. I love Jamed.
To live forever requires that you be hard. Take it one day at a time, Wendy.
I—I—Life is all different now—I did not know this would happen.
You should have asked more questions before you signed the contract. But, that is water under the bridge. Wendy, you are released from this call. And, remember.
Remember what?
This call never happened. Good day.
Wait, no--
The round plastic blazing red phone pressed a hard hung up knock-rod into my ear, I nearly dropped the phone, and turned to hand it back but I guessed I already handed it back because it went away and then I forgot it and I sat with my head down in my arms someplace in-between then and now and yesterday and someone touched my arm, and thank God it was Jamed thank God, Jamed, do you have things cleared up with the receptionist, I hope--
Sticker books! Ma’am, these top the whole thing off. Just ten dollars. How about it?
—fine but don’t bother me any more please, Jamed, I was saying it looks like you got the problem straightened out what was the problem how’d it turn out?
Snap!
What?
Lord God, the store-boy blew up came back snatching everything from before me, I jerked wide awake and wide alert as his monstrous wide tall face cut away smashed down every single thought I ever had or ever will, and pushed into me like a hand into a glove filling me out blowing me up with, Okay Ma’am, everything is in this cart. And everything totals up to eighty-seven dollars—that is, of course, not including tax. Is that all you need Ma’am?
—stand up wake up bat lashes rush blood back in face and say smiling something no stupid or wild answer him now be awake waken--
Oh, I said, rubbing my finger across my hot eyes. I am sorry, you did all this work and I slept right through it, I am sorry I usually don’t do that. My God, what—I am so sorry I’ve been sleeping right here in the God-da*ned store, like some homeless b*tch, how embarrassing. Oh. So. Anyway, I’m awake. Tell me what toys you picked. I’ll tell you if I’ll take each one or not.
What?
What do you mean, what?
I asked you about each one already, and you kind of said okay. But that’s all right I can go over them with you one last time.
When did you ask me? I was sleeping.
You were only sleeping on and off. When you looked wide awake I asked you about the toys.
I—uh--
—shut up! No don’t say you don’t remember don’t seem too odd or crazy or off—talk--
No. That’s all right. I’ll take them, of course.
—he seems a bright straight store-boy, he would not lie or gyp, but there’s a risk no there is no risk move on, get out, just to be here so long is odd very odd--
Are you sure, Ma’am?
Yes, I’m sure. Our little Janie will love them all.
That’s fine, Ma’am, he beamed. I’m glad I could help. That’s why we’re here, Ma’am, he replied with a tilt of his tight round little cute tight trimmed expensive head. Customers first.
Thanks. This has been great. Bye.
Bye Ma’am, have a great trip.
Smiling, I turned the cart handle that appeared in my hand, I turned away from the store-boy, my wheels all rattling and rattling, and yes, I was leaving, but something what?
Texas!
What Texas?
Oh, that Texas, yes Texas; very important quite important; I turned back scanned the floor stretching clean bright shining deep deeply all the way to the store-boy, like just stripped, just buffed, just become superclean, and; no Texas.
I turned rattling and rushing back to the store-boy, who’d begun to leave the area but I called hey and his small for a head but large for a medium grade necklace pearl face turned to catch me, So I said at him, Hey—did someone come by cleaning the floor while I was sitting at the desk?
No. No one. Why? Did you drop something what’d you drop I’ll find it what’d you drop?
Oh, no, I’ve got all my stuff, but; it’s just there was a big stain on the floor before. It’s gone now. I’m—surprised, but—hey, I’m sorry I know it’s a silly question, but what the h*ll. Why’s the stain gone when nobody cleaned?
The store-boy’s face turned to shadow. It had been wrong to come back and ask but what’s done is done, so I listened politely as he said, What it is, probably, Ma’am, is that since all the materials used to build this great store are the best money could buy, every single thing in here, including the floor, are so beautiful and glowing that even if they get dirty, the quality of this wonderful place pushes through the dirt and just overcomes it to ensure its beauty is never marred. How about that?
I smiled. He smiled. My God what crap. That just has to be something he was forced to memorize in some un-airconditioned summertime weeks-long store-boy training class, but no matter. Forget. After all, the question was so nothing, I don’t even remember why I asked it. I instantly turned away to forget him and get home as fast as possible. The next three days are going to be rough. Somewhere inside I just knew it. I tried not to start it off on a sour note, by realizing I had spent eighty-seven dollars for a little sack of toys. And that is still minus tax! Lord God, what a cool head of a salesman this store-boy was. Between that and the place aggravating my onomatophobia, I doubt I’ll go in that store ever again. But it is all worth it because the objective is to beat death and live forever. And ever. Cannot wait to show Jamed and Janie the toys, and to at last get to Bern. This is all so wild!
Can I help you ma’am?
Oh! Turn no turn yes there’s a sweet-faced store-boy of about twenty or around that spiral of ages that range yes see I am a judge of age ought to have taken up guessing ages and weights and all, on the boardwalk for several consecutive summers in a row, developing several consecutive suntans and here and there some very mild twinge-spots akin to real sunburn and--
Ma’am? Can I help you? You looking for toys? Is this the right age group? Or can I show you to another section? Tell me what exactly you are looking for, and I will find it for you.
Oh, yes—I said through my jagged fingertips pressed to the plastic and steel cool of the defective shopping carts push handle—Me and my husband and our eight year old Janie are taking a trip to Switzerland week after next, and I want to surprise Janie with some neat new toys to bring along on the flight and also to play with after Ma comes home and then we can get up and go, could even sleep a while in the plane if Janie is busy making little friends attracting them with her neat toys as would some old-school ventriloquist midget of two or three or five days in a row outside laying food traps all rotten and stenchy with maggots hatching and knowing like I do that poor greedy creatures of all kinds will come and grasp and feel, Wow what a sky above and what slimy skunk cabbage below but our parents you know were too careless with climbing their rapidly dissolving to vapor corporate stepladders, to think to plan and do an assessment of anything they were too busy to snag down away from the great thick heavy crushing tsunami of a continuous eternity of their pseudo-futures pouring out now and then back to the wide astonished but unaffected face of the store-boy who had asked if I needed help because, as always in bustling places like this, I stood alone frozen lost and forlorn—having thusly thought his question over, I said to him, Yes, what do you recommend? Toys for five to eight days, some in close quarters like a plane seat or waiting room standing to the side forest green tall garbage cans in the office we need to stop by and visit for a few which is okay because I really am supposed to be in the office now, anyway but this needs to get done get done yes get done now! So—can you help?
Oh, yes, no problem ma’am. Let me pull a few items from the shelf. Here.
He moved as a long thin slippery lizard and pulled down a very minor tiny imperceptible slide of colorful small toys in boxes and bags each of which I look at I cannot understand what you do with each one but it seems like kids today are you know they’re—hey! What are these?
Those? Oh. Those are Koosh balls.
Huh?
Koosh balls. Kids love them—and see, you spotted them in the bargain bin, everything in there is buy one get two free. See there?
What? Oh—yeah. I see that. What do kids do with these?
Play catch, pretty much.
Huh? He stood waiting to get an answer but the answer would have to be, God, that is ridiculous you can’t play catch to keep busy on a plane where once in a while they’ll let Janie play in the aisle but where most of the time she’ll be between me and Jamed, plus so what they’re soft and all that, number one; you can’t play catch good with less than a solid hard ball, and, number two; so what they’re soft and won’t hurt anybody they go off course go askew from a bad throw or whatever, nobody in a cramped airplane on an intercontinental flight will take kindly to being pummeled at random intervals by a featherweight yucky little wisp of a ball, no matter how cute the players, because on a long flight everything around everybody turns black-hearted ugly shitty and raw--
What about it, ma’am? Like the Koosh balls?
Not sure, spit from my lips, as the final and worse problem with playing ball in tight crowded spaces full of bad air and bad vibes broke all surf-like and foamy, obliterating the store-boy fully, erasing his fairly unimportant question, flowed down and down showing its reason for having appeared to me; yes, it needed to come and tell me, curving down before me like a scroll, upon which words came in great black block letters, yelling up into my face there is one more problem about playing catch for air travel amusement, that being that it assumes you have friends to play with; and no, yes, we don’t know for sure if we will; it’s a not too much of a logical stretch to think her happy manner, brand new toys, and the smiles of her obviously regularly bathed parents, yes her parents, in the real world outside this loopy thought-stream being me and Jamed, will go out of our way to coo and ahh and grin and nod and make the other parents crammed in on the plane sure that their prayers have been answered and here is a way to get a break from the twenty four seven strain of minding unruly children, yes, unruly and slow to learn like unsocialized young adult dogs, a strain to train indeed, and the strain varying by breed and it’s not like choosing a breed at the shelter since people-breeds come out and what you get is the deck you’re dealt, it’s like saying at the pound to the pound people give me a dog any dog any age my eyes are closed I will conceive this child and take the roll of the dice, even though if the possibility exists that I may receive a dog too large too evil non-housebreakable stinky drooling noisy super-shedding hard-to-handle and no good actually at all. Is not conceiving all the new humans like a Russian roulette spin? Here, we put one in the chamber; go on and spin and spin and point to your head and click the orgasmic trigger and hang on through what seems the eternal nine-month wait to see if your head blows off being given a child with the genes of a serial killer, or with the hollow click and the pee-in-your-pants relief that you will give birth to a smart honest healthy trainable maybe even already trained blasted from Zeus’ blood-splattering forehead as-goddess style fully formed and perfectly perfect Athena-like ball of effortless and perfect and no work at all, child—you know—the couple in the seat two rows back on the other side of the plane will nod to their perfectly trained Jesus-like superclean in body and mind, child fit to play with Janie, wow how great; to come over to play.
Or maybe not. You can’t tell a serial killer at first sight. Love at first sight doesn’t work out, either. Haste makes waste and all that too. The answer is given. The store comes back from the surrounding pondering hard-thinking mist, and I tell the slithery-slick super-skinny store-boy if I’ll go on and buy the Koosh balls, without looking at his gleaming white shirt whiter than white he looks like he is standing at the superhot focal point of the world’s largest new BrightSource solar power plant in California’s Mojave Desert that burns birds down from the sky like some god-da*ned real life world war two last resort super-secret Nazi death ray—sure look it up if you don’t think that’s true, look it us yes up and yes up yes—then for some reason, everything went scalding hot and I recoiled and saw the store-boy again, and ran for safety in the cool gap between us throwing out words to grapple the cool back and over and around me, to survive. I listened to what I found myself saying as the scalding peeled away layer on layer cooling down and down remove the deadly power plant immediately if not sooner please--
No, I don’t think that’s what I want. I’m sorry.
Oh?
Right—but what else would you recommend?
Oh, yes, well then right here right here yes here it is yes, wait.
He grabbed out into the blur around us, and brought out a hazy item somehow really thickly hazed over, like people in a true-to-life COPS show get their faces blurred because they are unwilling to be identified for some paranoid reason, it was not definable until a fat surf of words foamed all splashy out over the blur and made it so any footprints in the sand could be seen clearly at the beach, at least until the next wave foamed out over to erase them all—I said the name of the thing in his hand quick, before it would be washed away and be gone, never was, forever.
Ah, Playdoh. That’s Playdoh. I see. Yeah, that’s a good idea—Playdoh. Only thing is, are you sure that’s not too young for an eight-year-old?
Oh, no. It would be fine. And also--
What also?
Also, studies have shown it will occupy a child on a plane for at least forty minutes.
Studies?
Right.
Okay, wait a second, let me think; Sure, take your time; I blinked away and pictured little Janie sitting in a cramped airliner seat with a postage stamp sized tray table folded down before her, puzzled as how to get lost in Playdoh-play on a surface almost as small as a three by five index card, but my hand went to my face and tilted down, smacking me silly with the sudden sight of a stain in the linoleum floor at the tip of the store-boy’s pointy shiny loafers, this stain being shaped roughly like the state of Texas; any thought of how Janie would handle the Playdoh sank onto and into and past the stain until it was gone—the stain was the important thing; one does not see this kind of thing every day; but, roughly the shape of Texas is not good enough, no—as somewhere in a pitch-black compartment way back in a corner of my brain, little Janie continued struggling to play correctly with a dozen round containers of Playdoh, that once the Doh was removed from them, there was nowhere to put them aside to make way for the Play with the actual Doh, without them rolling away toward a fall to the floor followed by a quick sharp roll under the airplane seats. Remember, round smooth cumbersome children’s toy items have embedded in their DNA the instinct to not stay where they are put, to always strive for an excuse to fall over, roll away, and drop off the play surface—just as surely as someone with skill and taste and time and tools would have to get down and define underline outline and boldface the stain on the toy store floor, in an effort to make it into a perfect tiny Texas, so that not just I, who has been solely quite focused on the stain for nearly a full minute now, would see; like the pain in my belly from trying to squeeze down to reach a dropped object beneath an airline seat with no legroom to begin with and with a seat belt strapped on because round plastic children’s toy items strive always when rolling to come to rest in some jet-black place where it would be an extremely difficult effort to bent down twist around grunt and groan to retrieve them, and—sure enough it hits me again and again like a jackhammer of dismay that Texas being an interesting scuff-stain in the floor when it’s only nearly shaped that way, is not true at all. The stain yelled at my face, No, yes, pay attention, I have a purpose, yes, I do, yes, I do, I must be known I must be noticed—I must be more a really sharp Texas one glance at me should spear them with Texas—must try to get it where did they roll all but one rolled ugh must bend down pain pain—I need to catch my breath, and I straightened to see a sweating fat bald man’s face above the seatback that said, Ma’am, could your child play with something else? I did not buy a ticket to have little girl’s playthings rolling under hitting my feet and taking my legroom—droplets flew off from his quivering cheeks, I had never seen anyone sweat so much, but it must be made so that every person passing by the stain growing from the airplane’s complaining fat man slinging down his impure string of pearly sweatdrips spattering the floor, who knows what Texas looks like on a map, would stop and gape and get hit with a club in the mouth to say, Hey! That stain equals Texas! Sure, see there, I was right! That’s over, very good. Yes—and I say back, I am glad you agree; the little cheap Playdoh jars are open and Janie’s smallish but nicely tapering hands worked the dough into some unrecognizably unique shape she had in mind, and—the uneasy need to doublecheck something pushed my hand down an inch from my face again, and up came Texas. Texas! I was testing the concept, and yes; it’s Texas yes, it is yes. It. Is. Woof!
But, Ma’am, excuse me please, could your child play with something else?
Ma’am, please answer, could your child play with something else?
Ma’am, I am being nice, I must ask again. Could your child play with something else?
Well, Ma’am? What do you think. Want the Playdoh?
Ma’am, could your child please play with something else? If you don’t answer I will ring the stewardess!
What? Who? I, uh, no. No. No was the safest answer when the last thirty seconds or so of pondering the answer cannot be remembered and thus must be thought over again to make sure, is, in the interim, as I finally stated quite crisply and clearly, No.
Why not? said the store-boy. I’m curious to know?
Ma’am, did I hear you right, you told me no? Answer now!
Because it’s messy. Goes all over. Plus, there’s not enough space on a seatback fold-down tray on a cramped no-legroom plane to really be able to let loose and play right. And there’s more I knew but just because I can’t remember what it was doesn’t mean it isn’t true I wish I could tell you, but—the reasons exist. I just don’t know what they are. Understand?
Not really, said the young gleaming store-boy, but that’s okay. There’s more ideas I have for you. Just wait a second. There’s something back here.
He twisted and reached displaying a huge underarm sweat-stain for the first time, but though I used to think him clean, something somewhere that I’ve also forgotten makes me unsurprised that he is really quite unclean. He’s very good at hiding it; he had me fooled good, ‘till now. He repositioned the Playdoh box on the shelf with the other dozen or so, then somehow on a lower level his quick hand transformed the Playdoh box into another box of an entirely different color shape and size which when pulled up said really big across the side, Lego; which I then repeated aloud, yes thusly; Legos? That’s great. That’s perfect. I think I’ll definitely buy that. Sure, why not. Everybody’s okay with Legos. I’m too worn out, it’s already a long day, sure what the h*ll; I’ll take them. What else you got? I need a lot more by the end of the day.
Oh, there’s plenty more. I’ll pick out more things like that. But, I can see you’re tired. Go rest a bit at that desk over there where all that paperwork’s spread. Nobody’s going to use it today, you can sit there nobody’s going to say it’s wrong so stay there and take a breather. Let me shop for you for a little bit. But first, tell me. How long is your flight? You need enough toys to keep your daughter busy through the whole flight. How long is it?
It’s about ten or eleven hours.
Great—so you’ll need four or five playsets to make it through. You okay to buy that many? It will probably wind up costing between almost a hundred dollars, but definitely no more than that. That sound all right?
Oh, sure, I said.
Great! he snapped, so loud hard and fast it hit the wall across the room, splatted over all and everything, and recoiled him spinning away to find toys for my child. He was trying so hard to impress me; he obviously cared for the wellbeing in the airplane tomorrow of my sweet child Janie, so I sat at the desk he’d pointed out and laid my head gently down on my arms folded down on the desk. The cushion pushed under me pressed up and out and all around saying Lord, God, Wendy Wendy dear little one, you are so worn out. You need to get some sleep tonight before tomorrow comes all hot tight flamed up super-hotly or worse, all horribly dreadful, swallowing us gone in one earsplitting Rolls-Royce powered fastgulp of a planeride, carrying us now forward to tomorrow in and about the people mover warship that had fired and fired and ultimately worn the sh*t out of me here in the store all hollow like I am. Sheeee*t. Probably thoughts of the long dreadful day tomorrow that’s doomed for quick swallowing by the horrid creepy greedy signed and sealed trip to Bern Switzerland we’re being forced to undertake. It’ll be Hot. It’ll be Sticky. Smelly. Sh*tty. And it’s only necessary because we paid tons of money to ensure that we’ll be euthanized at age fifty-nine, on a gamble that by then we’ll be able to be revived and live a whole ‘nother life and et cetera in a very extreme sense. What a h*ll of a plot! Plus, little Janie will get euthanized and revived for free. What deal, my sweet dear, can top that? I had cold feet sure, I told Jamed a couple of times let’s quit, let’s cancel, let’s knock off the whole dopey thing. I told him before we left for the first trip to Bern, and I told him after the sh*tty knock-knock kind of trip and visit and trip back with nothing at all that makes sense accomplished that I could see anyhow anyway that we ended up having; but Jamed just told me have faith, hang in there, we’re together and fully committed. We need to be bigger than the lives we’ve been dealt. What’s bigger than living forever? Nodding and looking away like I did, told me that telling him yes would end up way easier than to argue. But the trips to Bern every ten years or so, to maintain our membership, will be more and more exhausting. Yes, my head leaned on my hand, whose elbow leaned out of the desk that held a great big sink to wash up in after this next long Journey that somehow I can’t remember because it hasn’t happened yet, but I know that the store-boy is working hard to make sure Janie is occupied through the whole trip and that much at least, will be covered. That will calm us a bit and we’ll probably nap and get there wide awake and freshened up; and, just like the first trip, we are required by contract to go to the Resurrection club’s headquarters to sign whatever needed to be signed immediately, without any delay. It’s a stupid rule and who knows why, but that’s what they want. Go immediately upon arrival or they’ll dump us, we were told. So, after checking into the hotel we arranged for their free babysitting service, because Janie at least must go to bed immediately because she’s totally conked-out from the flight during which the toys we bought were totally right and absolutely exceeded our expectations. God bless that store-boy the other day; thank God I went to that store, which I considered avoiding because its name contains words evocative of those involved in my lifelong battle with onomatophobia; we tucked Janie in and waited for the sitter, who turned out to be an extremely small pale extremely old person, who could have passed for either male or female, whose face was no more than a mass of deep wrinkles and who wore a shiny jet-black beehive rock-hard hairdo wig that smelled faintly of mothballs and looked as old as the sitter itself. The sitter just came in and said nothing and glided somehow not really walked to an easy chair against the far wall, and sat and pulled out a great black book and opened it, and said, I will just sit here and entertain myself. You two kids have fun; and a smile or perhaps more like a flicker of a smile-shape pushed out its wrinkles, glowed at us, reached us and was perceived by us, and then was gone. Then it seems some massive plates in the geology of reality shifted several yards at once, because she finished her sentence saying, What about Loom Bands? These are very popular this year. Price is only sixteen dollars. Like these?
All right, I said—who knew why but I said all right and rushed Jamed ahead out of the room into the nice fresh hall, and down the elegant old-school elevator, brought up to modern code as the whole world-famous Bellevue Palace hotel has been, from peak of its fashionably slightly crooked and very honestly antique lightning rods to the richly fossilized bedrock its colossal foundations rest on. We went across the gleaming marble floored and walled and ceilinged lobby, vast and airy as brand new but actually very, very, very antique like a body stretched on an embalming table waiting to die so it will finally be where it belongs but we didn’t pause we rushed out to the street, and were hit by old Bern, just like last time, which Jamed had explained that nothing was strafed bombed incinerated or fire-stormed to less than ash here, because Switzerland was neutral, which actually seemed to just have said because somehow this new trip is our last trip at the same time, joining the Club de la Resurrection, which is to enable immortality, has made us both grow to see what immortality really means in a loopy sort of wild nonsensical way, hah, that being that all time past and future is really just one time that’s around us all the time and for things to make sense to our backward limited minds, the notion of time was created to prevent mass insanity of the entire race—and—Jamed yelled look, look, I turned, he was paused and pointing.
What? I said—he stood smiling beside a tall old Kiosk ragged with obsolete faded and tattered notices of gatherings and functions long gone to the fading past. He said, look here, there’s some information posted up here about what tourists should make sure not to miss in Bern. Let’s stop and give it a look. We ought to get to know the place a little. After all we’ll be coming here three of four more times. Check it out.
I scuffed up and pretended to read the tourist information, though I was much too tired from the flight, and the final check in here for euthanization won’t be before we’re nearly sixty. Lord, God, that’s so far away. It’s like so unreal. Like the cadaverous icy cheesy dead meat-people we process through the joint we run to get money to stay alive. It’s unreal, actually to do what we do. But if you do it long enough, it becomes real. But, it will take until our final moments on our deathbeds to really see how real it all is, but; then it will be too late, no way can we know what life can be when it’s all really real to us; mortal, when it’s over we just get slid in a hole and that’s that, might as well not even have lived, but—immortal, you get to start over after revivement, I mean, hold it let’s stop here, I got a problem. I’m sensitive to words. The way they sound when heard, the way they taste when spoken. Words you don’t say ever in your whole life probably. Like revivement. Revivement is not a medical procedure performed to clean up a wound when a ghastly gash of an injury is all muddy full of stones or a degloving thing. The proper word there is debridement. It’s also not to be mistaken for deployment dismemberment development environment unemployment establishment et cetera go et cetera, no, that that washed up music guy whose name sounds like sounds like sounds like sound here comes the deeptanned wideshouldered lifeguard to save us from continuing to the inevitable end. The lifeguard grips us and drags us to some shady place where we’re handed by who knows who what does it matter who saves your life anyway, uh—the lifeguard becomes a gang of the same their job is to save it’s legal that they stop you first and it’s legal we demolish anything and everything that might distract you like any landmarks either ancient or new that contribute to the fact that the old town in Bern was listed amongst the five hundred UNESCO world cultural heritage sites in nineteen eighty three. Now, here’s what’s wrong; the heritage site title was given to the neighborhood around the same time the Patriciosilva dental practice we walked to will walk to have walked to all at the same time, was given the clean mouth clean mind award by a large-scale jury of Patricio’s peers most whom are now in cemeteries and not just any old cemetery, no—but why was Jamed into saying in some different voice, Usborn Activity Cards! She will love these! Only eighteen fifty-six. What about it?
His eyes pulled out an answer that I recognized after initial confusion as coming from myself, that was, Yes, that is great; and I know it came from me, yes, because the eyes also rang in my head saying, Humor me, humor me, I’ve done so much for you Wendy, the least you can do is humor me—I had yes I had, but being dog-tired almost in a trance, I had to ride this out stay on track, like; it’s about bigwigs being laid down in not just any old cemeteries no, but only in expensive ritzy big cemeteries because these were top-notch high-income old-money world-class dentists who truly lived the job and were never handed a fucking thing in their lives—so unlike me and Jamed who had the Davis Funeral home silver spoon jammed so far down our throats that our gagging has grown to be less troublesome through the years since but still attacks with a vengeance but subtly so sneakily stealthily it times itself to when we accidentally open the densely packed bowels of this or that fat-fed corpse who’s really pissed inside at being abruptly demoted from being way out all alive and on top, to a corpse cold and naked on a frigid stainless steel slab—such corpses eject mass quantities of poop stained gas flush flush spray peppered with moist flecks all around spattered out good and thoroughly; yes it is at such times that the gag is thrust up from all the rotten sh*t deep down below the dark which is the corpse, to remind us that this is no way the best way to make a living, there’s other stuff, but; it’s late I think I need to sleep now yes no yes see yes wins I must rise seek out a salad to shove in followed by a dozen frosty cold bottles of Poland Spring bottled spring water, chosen because years back that the rumor was that Evian water was not spring at all but was manufactured from a blend of acidic suds and slop cream and the leavings of those we’ll never know actually because things that stop fall back in time more quickly than we can hold our attention on them straining to read whatever passes for their label until they’re too far back to be heard any more. A thirty-year fold back of the warp and woof of time like that well I, myself—could never remember what theme song to pick as commemoration so no music will be played in honor of these brave men and women and this is why they’re all forgotten today; yes, something as simple as the malt shop juke box not being properly updated by the vendor firm whose name old Ted forgot anyway, so he said to himself what he dared not say aloud—I don’t really give a f*ck sh*t hey, hey. The past’s so gone it’s really never was. Hic, hey, we got there fine. Go in is what’s generally done when one gets there unless it’s a corporate picnic in which case some stuffy-nosed worm sneaks you in all the way in yes under the ex-big top’s cheap-deal rental-tent, and you’re in. And nobody even noticed you’re nude from the waist down—hey, no, only kidding—made you look! Hah, anyway, here we’re in and there she is with time to spare but somehow weird it’s not we just got here it’s like we never left the first time and this is generally cause for alarm because some kind of top secret hypnotism may be at work here yes, no, Hey! But lord God I slept all through reading the Kiosk and walking the short twilight walk to 1 Kochergasse, and the entry into the Patriciosilva dental office and the step up to the check-in window, waving and flapping and grunting and groaning our step by step way through the thick super-clean unnatural dental office air as the last time we came ten years or so back. The air’s a drug to slow us down the rewinding time slide we’re into backwards is how it’s explained in the Resurrection Club’s boilerplate literature, and there we stood again bellied up to the receptionist tapped the window and the receptionist’s face rose again out of her still jet-black hair and it’s the same woman the same age it seems as last time, saying, okay, decided to come back, did you—did you go to get paper and pen I told you, you need? I hope you got it this time, I truly do indeed! Got paper and pen paper and pen ah yes! I really and truly hope you do indeed! Ah, yes, I—I thought you were leaving—what else do you need? I remember thinking you needed pen and paper before you signed the signature sheet. But you already signed the signature sheet good that is great—oh yes and here, check this over, Ma’am. A magnetic travel game. She’ll love it! Only eleven dollars. This one okay? Hey hey—seems like it should be. When you wake up let me know.
Just a blip it was in my head, probably from fatigue, I snapped, Sure, but that one word drowned dissolving under Jamed’s wide open firehose shotgun-spray of words.
Hold it, wait, slow down. We didn’t sign any sheet for today. What are you talking about?
Oh yes, Mister Davis, I’m afraid you did. Look—look, here—see?
The large frog green binder slapped up from the dark wide open and she pointed to one of the lines and said, See here sir, it’s signed. Yes, it is—I told you.
Wait, sniped Jamed. That must be the one we signed on our first visit—what’s the date look at the date, here—and, leaning forward, he pushed his finger toward hers, more than a push, actually a jab, more than a jab, actually a stab; and he must have been sorry to have reacted so roughly, because he seemed to come to somehow like he’d been in a trance but he’d not been in one so I did not understand. No, he said. That’s not what we signed before. That’s today’s date. Where is the one from last time, but—hey! Why is the one with today’s date signed?
Because you just signed it before, before you started to leave. I saw you.
No! Who signed for us? An imposter was here pretending to be us! Who was it? Where did they—wait, how many were here? Two like me and Wendy are now? Or, a variable quantity not greater than one thousand but not less than one? Not less than one because people-presence cannot be counted negative. A negative number of people would be—well—quite abnormal. Did you know that see I know that—as I say, what you’re saying is absolutely abnormal.
My foot shuffled over. Some kind of different Jamed had spoken. I stepped back as he waited for the receptionist to reply, breathing quite heavily; I thought of agonal breathing; years back I heard agonal breathing for the first and only time, when at two a.m. we got a call that a client’s father had just passed down at Wildwood hospital. Wildwood hospital did everything in the hospice ward for free. That is because more than one hundred years ago, the founder, the Very Reverend Monsignor Henry S. Wildwood, a renowned Jesuit, and a larger cross-time thinker and imagineer than any others in the order, which is saying a lot, decided that the homeless and otherwise poor, should no longer pass on in alleys full of garbage cans, or in abandoned cars beside abandoned Victorians, which virtually litter the deserted streets of the rough tough bottom-side of this county’s biggest urban center, but--
Excuse me, said the receptionist around past Jamed. Mrs. Davis? Mrs. Davis, there’s a phone call for you. It’s Dr. Patriciosilva. Here—oh she did push a telephone into the edge of my perception. But who would be calling me here? It made no sense so I went on all about the story of what happened in the hospice unit down at Wildwood. We got to the hospital only to find that the loved one we’d been called to take had not passed yet. God had made him seem dead but had given him a five-hour reprieve, and--
Mrs. Davis, please! Take this phone! It’s Dr. Patriciosilva and it’s urgent. Mrs. Davis, what is wrong. Can’t you hear me?
—the telephone started rattling very hard now in the envelope of my sealed off fatigued airspace but not enough to not finish what I am saying which is, to get right to the point, that we arrived way too soon and we waited around because the nurses said he had probably less time to live than it would take us to go back to the funeral parlor, and then turn around and come back again. We stayed and waited and then we watched the man die. It was fairly quiet and peaceful most of the time probably due to the full-throttle end-times old folks’ Morphine drip, but at the end we witnessed around fifteen minutes of agonal breathing. Ask Jamed, that’s where he learned to do agonal breathing yes Ma yes Pa that’s what he is doing now working this signature sheet issue that’s it he’s trying to make her think she is killing him maybe with her lies or maybe a combination of lies and brute ignorance, he is doing it, he manipulates some of the casket company salesmen that way—what do I think? Here’s what I think; I think that dying man who passed with us present, let go his spirit and on its way to the pearly gates it paused because its appointment with Saint Peter was not for another hour and it’s—what? Dear God no. Now she’s stuck her head in my space saying some nonsense like, Look, this is perfect—A toy Aquadoodle. Quite the rage right now. Only sixteen and a half dollars. How about this?
Da*ned stubborn subhuman flash-hole masquerading as a harmless store-boy—so stubborn oh stubborn much too stubborn—I humored her with a yes that had already proved to dissolve that nonsense a few times, where was I yes it is always rude to arrive at a party of any kind way too early, because the hosts are not yet ready the dogs are not kenneled the children are not at the babysitter’s just like Peter Pater’s snot ready to see this man’s spirit soul so it swooped through Jamed, wound up tight some secret spring in his brain that has waited all these years all real tight and ready to let go, until this day when it got triggered and it send him on a modified path grew him up a slice sure injected him with old fart juice of the male variety, and is now powering him to repeat over and over to the receptionist, Who signed this? I demand to know! Do you know who we are, Miss? Do you?
Yes, I do sir, but wait, just wait—Mrs. Davis, please listen! Last chance, take the phone, it is the doctor who is second only to the Great Founder in the Resurrection Club. His time is precious, you are wasting his time! Take it now!
Wait no! I asked you a question, yelled Jamed, but I pushed my hand out in front of him, grabbed the phone, yelled back to her, Jesus, Jeez, don’t yell, you don’t have to push it out in my face like that, here hand it over here, right here, yes, yes—all right, here I am. What is the problem?
Mrs. Davis? This is Mrs. Jamed Davis? Is it--
Lady, listen, yelled Jamed behind me, blasting out loud to the Receptionist. Don’t be stupid, the question is simple! Who signed this? Tell me now!
I turned away, took a step, and said into the phone, Yes, I am Mrs. Davis—but please speak up, my husband is talking really loud to your receptionist about a big problem we just ran into, maybe you should come out and fix it, it’s the important thing right now.
No! Block it out! Now! You and I are what’s important right now!
What? Listen, there’s a problem out here, do something! My husband is very upset! If he gets sick, I swear to God, you and your staff will pay.
Mrs. Davis, I’m sorry but your husband is on his own right now. If you mention this problem one more time, or you tell me to speak up one more time, you will both be denied membership in the Resurrection Club, and the money you have paid so far toward your membership will never be refunded. Since we are in Switzerland, you will find it difficult if not impossible to afford winning a long-drawn-out court case to get your money back. Do you understand? Take a deep breath before you answer. There is nothing else in the universe while we are on the phone, but your voice and intellect, and my voice and intellect. Is that clear? You are just a single hairsbreadth away from being denied eternal life. Are you clear? Or do you wish that the two of you should be condemned to death, with no return or possibility of parole?
My hand clapped to my free ear to shut off Jamed, and what, yes, a gulp a large gulp too large much too large spit the da*ned thing out yes you understand say it gag choke on it but do it—spit! The word condemned definitely got my attention.
Yes, came from me calmly—it is clear.
Then seconds tick forward one by one, quiet, too quiet so quiet oh no—did I say the right thing will I live forever will Jamed and our baby little Janie too or have I fucked up really dark scary and final, God the answer please the answer I can take it oh God, here he is, quiet listen lives are at stake—here he comes, I am ready it, won’t be good no it won’t call me silly but it feels like the feeling before mounting a scale during a diet—all right, here it comes it comes, step, go on I am focused tight yes quite tight so, tell me what I’ve gained I can take it--
Good, he said warmly. I am glad we are on the same wavelength now. It is happy for your whole family that we are. Believe me.
Doctor, I was scared to death! I blurted, waving aside the sudden flood of light. To death!
All right Wendy. That’s all in the past, calm down now. I will now teach you. Listen. Are you listening? The lesson is simple. It is just eight words. Here it is—ready?
Yes—here the surf once more though foamed over yelling oh no yelling, Finger Puppets! Look at this, Ma’am. Perfect for the plane, and only fifteen dollars. We’re up to seventy-seven dollars if you want this too Ma’am. How about it—fine, but go away, you have been humored no not now go not now, tell him—thank God, he’s still waiting its quiet yell to the quiet oh--
Yes, I am ready.
In the forever life, it is always now. Say it back.
In the forever life, it is always now.
All right Wendy. Now we are level and connected. Listen; what has gone on up to now upon your arrival here, is all carefully scripted. Today we are beginning the final test of your husband to make sure he is suitable for the gift of eternal life.
Testing? What kind of testing? You’ve got him all pissed off. That’s all I see.
That is what it might seem like I know, but our methods are tried and proven. We must test and test and test again, because immortality laid on the wrong people can lead to a complete mental breakdown and the need for permanent euthanasia. If this is going to happen it will be two or three lifetimes down the road that the breakdown will occur. We are beginning a long-term test of your husband to see how much stress he can absorb over time. He will be almost constantly angry, frustrated, and depressed for the rest of his present iteration of life. If he does not break down before you both report for termination at the end of the whole process we’re leading you through, he will be judged acceptable to be gifted with immortality. Now. Do you have any questions at this point?
I—uh, no—oh wait; yes, I do. In other words, you are saying that you intend to pile enough stress upon Jamed to see if he’ll go nuts or not?
That is exactly correct. Why did you choose this as a question?
It’s really going to be hard to watch him go through this. Really hard. But, I’m glad you told me I will help him through all the stress and strain, I will help him to know he is only being tested. I know I can help him through it that way.
No! No. Absolutely not!
What? Absolutely not what, exactly?
You will not tell him that we told you this, and no matter how great his suffering might be, you must never give in to the mounting pressure to cry out to us that we should stop, back off him, we need to stop, or anything like that. And, if you tell him about this information you are being given now, both of you will end up in Hell and have your eternal futures shut down in an irrevocable way. This is your test. You’re both being tested. Your test is if you will be able to see Mr. Davis enduring Hell on Earth until the day you both die, without noticing it, speaking of it, or breaking down and giving up and pleading for us to stop it. You must project the perfect image of the better you than me uncaring ice cold jackass. Again—now that you have been told the whole plan—what questions before you’re released from this phone call? You’ve a right to have questions you know. Go on. There’s no time limit.
I—is this really going to go on for the rest of our lives?
I already told you, yes.
I really don’t know if I can do this. It’s really much too hard. I love Jamed.
To live forever requires that you be hard. Take it one day at a time, Wendy.
I—I—Life is all different now—I did not know this would happen.
You should have asked more questions before you signed the contract. But, that is water under the bridge. Wendy, you are released from this call. And, remember.
Remember what?
This call never happened. Good day.
Wait, no--
The round plastic blazing red phone pressed a hard hung up knock-rod into my ear, I nearly dropped the phone, and turned to hand it back but I guessed I already handed it back because it went away and then I forgot it and I sat with my head down in my arms someplace in-between then and now and yesterday and someone touched my arm, and thank God it was Jamed thank God, Jamed, do you have things cleared up with the receptionist, I hope--
Sticker books! Ma’am, these top the whole thing off. Just ten dollars. How about it?
—fine but don’t bother me any more please, Jamed, I was saying it looks like you got the problem straightened out what was the problem how’d it turn out?
Snap!
What?
Lord God, the store-boy blew up came back snatching everything from before me, I jerked wide awake and wide alert as his monstrous wide tall face cut away smashed down every single thought I ever had or ever will, and pushed into me like a hand into a glove filling me out blowing me up with, Okay Ma’am, everything is in this cart. And everything totals up to eighty-seven dollars—that is, of course, not including tax. Is that all you need Ma’am?
—stand up wake up bat lashes rush blood back in face and say smiling something no stupid or wild answer him now be awake waken--
Oh, I said, rubbing my finger across my hot eyes. I am sorry, you did all this work and I slept right through it, I am sorry I usually don’t do that. My God, what—I am so sorry I’ve been sleeping right here in the God-da*ned store, like some homeless b*tch, how embarrassing. Oh. So. Anyway, I’m awake. Tell me what toys you picked. I’ll tell you if I’ll take each one or not.
What?
What do you mean, what?
I asked you about each one already, and you kind of said okay. But that’s all right I can go over them with you one last time.
When did you ask me? I was sleeping.
You were only sleeping on and off. When you looked wide awake I asked you about the toys.
I—uh--
—shut up! No don’t say you don’t remember don’t seem too odd or crazy or off—talk--
No. That’s all right. I’ll take them, of course.
—he seems a bright straight store-boy, he would not lie or gyp, but there’s a risk no there is no risk move on, get out, just to be here so long is odd very odd--
Are you sure, Ma’am?
Yes, I’m sure. Our little Janie will love them all.
That’s fine, Ma’am, he beamed. I’m glad I could help. That’s why we’re here, Ma’am, he replied with a tilt of his tight round little cute tight trimmed expensive head. Customers first.
Thanks. This has been great. Bye.
Bye Ma’am, have a great trip.
Smiling, I turned the cart handle that appeared in my hand, I turned away from the store-boy, my wheels all rattling and rattling, and yes, I was leaving, but something what?
Texas!
What Texas?
Oh, that Texas, yes Texas; very important quite important; I turned back scanned the floor stretching clean bright shining deep deeply all the way to the store-boy, like just stripped, just buffed, just become superclean, and; no Texas.
I turned rattling and rushing back to the store-boy, who’d begun to leave the area but I called hey and his small for a head but large for a medium grade necklace pearl face turned to catch me, So I said at him, Hey—did someone come by cleaning the floor while I was sitting at the desk?
No. No one. Why? Did you drop something what’d you drop I’ll find it what’d you drop?
Oh, no, I’ve got all my stuff, but; it’s just there was a big stain on the floor before. It’s gone now. I’m—surprised, but—hey, I’m sorry I know it’s a silly question, but what the h*ll. Why’s the stain gone when nobody cleaned?
The store-boy’s face turned to shadow. It had been wrong to come back and ask but what’s done is done, so I listened politely as he said, What it is, probably, Ma’am, is that since all the materials used to build this great store are the best money could buy, every single thing in here, including the floor, are so beautiful and glowing that even if they get dirty, the quality of this wonderful place pushes through the dirt and just overcomes it to ensure its beauty is never marred. How about that?
I smiled. He smiled. My God what crap. That just has to be something he was forced to memorize in some un-airconditioned summertime weeks-long store-boy training class, but no matter. Forget. After all, the question was so nothing, I don’t even remember why I asked it. I instantly turned away to forget him and get home as fast as possible. The next three days are going to be rough. Somewhere inside I just knew it. I tried not to start it off on a sour note, by realizing I had spent eighty-seven dollars for a little sack of toys. And that is still minus tax! Lord God, what a cool head of a salesman this store-boy was. Between that and the place aggravating my onomatophobia, I doubt I’ll go in that store ever again. But it is all worth it because the objective is to beat death and live forever. And ever. Cannot wait to show Jamed and Janie the toys, and to at last get to Bern. This is all so wild!
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