A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  the otherwise disappeared. I hung my head the

  longer I played, neck bent à la Picasso, goose-

  necked. Blue noose, blue gnosis, blue impromptu

  the

  truth

  was

  __________________

  It was Ohnedaruth’s day again, truth be told,

  blue Trane, blue truth, dark light in a dark

  time, bent necks bent but not broke. Not to not

  men-

  tion Elvin knocking underneath, off to one

  side. Song in a strange land long since, how now

  not to sing except to sing tear it all a brand

  new…

  It was Ohnedaruth’s day again, Leroy

  brought in for the extension string meant, his

  and mine and Jimmy’s Hofriyati thread. It

  was

  Ohnedaruth’s day rebe-

  gun

  __________________

  No matter what else, I needed, like Wayne

  said, not to think about music. I called

  on thoughts of the hair within my lady’s love

  re-

  gion, a koan of sorts, her ladyship such

  as it was, nothing less likely there… I feasted

  on paradox, of a mind for what was not,

  wide-

  eyed for what would not be seen, a late les-

  son in notness grown motivic, a school of

  di-

  lation a-

  gain

  __________________

  No neck bent but whose it no longer

  was was me and my oud’s dream of

  success. Ovoid back more belly than

  back,

  not not to mention its rhyme with

  jelly. A mystic remit we tested our teeth

  with…

  Madrigal briar,

  breath

  Days of Heaven

  A. D. Jameson

  A grown-up man not unlike me is trying to coax a struggling child into a box. That’s badly phrased and only a single sentence in we are in need of starting over. The man is trying to make the child—a slender boy no older than seven—take a few steps inside a bunker half submerged in sand somewhere; it’s on a lonely beach somewhere, possibly Spain. The bunker is concrete and squat and dark and full of cobwebs—it’s presumably full of cobwebs, but this is a very safe presumption and if it isn’t full of cobwebs, it’s full of crabs. Also the bunker has no windows and no ventilation and must be stuffy, and why is this grown-up man who’s presumably well educated and friendly and knows right from wrong intent on doing this curious thing? We assume he has his reasons. The child resists and he too has his reasons; humans are rational, after all. The child is shaking his head and trying to free his left arm from the grown-up’s grip, which is holding him very tightly, being secured by grown-up muscles, and it’s doubtful the boy will succeed. And so he’s writhing and crying and being an all-around pest; you know how kids are. The bunker’s heavy door is wide open but it is heavy and made of steel and no doubt after the child enters, if he enters, if he’s foolish enough to enter, the man will swing the heavy door shut and that will be that. The man has promised not to do this, but the child suspects he’s lying, and we suspect the man is lying, and I happen to know for a fact that the man is lying, and this comes as no surprise. All grown-ups lie. All children know this and yet they must rely on grown-ups, who are stronger than them, and meaner, and fickle, and come and go as they please, and do as they please, and are not subject to higher powers. And if they are, those higher powers are other grown-ups, and fickle and abstract and mysterious and absent. The child digs his heels in the sand and twists and turns and tries again to free his arm to no effect; he is merely chafing the skin that encloses his wrist, and he cries and shouts but there is no one else who can hear and no one who’d come to his aid if they did. And he will weaken or relent, or else the man will lose his patience and grow more violent, and grab the child with both hands, or strike his face, or grab his legs, and thereby shove him into the bunker, or drag him in. Although if the grown-up enters the bunker there’s always the chance that the child will manage to wriggle free, and knock the grown-up on his behind, and dart outside and with the very last of his strength swing the heavy door shut. But the grown-up isn’t in any hurry; he seems to be toying with the child, enjoying the struggle, because he’s much stronger. Even the weakest grown-up is stronger than a child; it’s no fair contest. The grown-up could shove the child inside at any moment, so he must be after a different sort of pleasure, a different pleasure altogether. The child’s afraid; the child is terribly afraid; the child is terrified, the way only children can be, because they are weak, and can’t assume life is theirs to keep. And the pleasure that grown-ups take in inspiring fear like that strikes me as very cheap, because it’s an easy fear to arouse; I rarely go days without scaring children, either intentionally or on accident. I find it more rewarding to scare adults, whose fear is more pleasant. But at the same time I understand what the grown-up’s after.

  Life’s a bitch. For instance, once upon a time there were two lovers and they were happy being in love. They did almost everything together, they shopped and ate and bathed together, they went to the rodeo together, and one day they perished. Except that perished isn’t the right word; custom dictates that I use another word, but perished’s the word I want to use and so I’ll use it. From their remains grew a crooked tree, and on that tree grew a crooked fruit, and when it ripened thirteen years later, that fruit became a little boy. He is our neighbor now and he mows our lawn in the summer, and in the winter he shovels our drive. And he is as green as green can be; each time I see him, I do believe he’s gotten greener. “Have you gotten greener?” I always ask him, and he buries his face in his hands and weeps with such force that the windows rattle, and the windows and walls of the garden shed buckle and shake. But I take a lot of pleasure in the asking, so I ask. I’m curious as to what he does on weekends, but not so curious that I come right out and ask him. I prefer to imagine that like most children he disappears, that he goes off to the land of the interesting lizards—have you visited that land? Of course you have, but let me tell you all about it, because the pleasure is in the telling, and your memory isn’t the best. It is a land of ideal lizards, each one more interesting than the last. Some of the lizards know how to fly, and some repair cars, and some can do complex sums in their heads. Others belch blood that leaves dark stains and smells like Coca-Cola used to, back in the day. And there are other lizards besides that, better and worse, but if I describe them in rigorous detail then we’ll be at it all day, because there are more of them every second; they’re constantly hatching out of eggs. Suffice to say, there are a lot of them and they’re attractive. And children are always chasing after them, pulling their tails or tossing them back and forth like footballs, or batting at their bulging reptile eyes with sticks, or painting their toenails and scales different colors, and stuffing bubblegum down their throats. You must remember doing this. I saw you doing this, or doing something like this, back in the day. Your hair was billowing in the warm summer breeze—the sirocco, I think people call it—and you were muttering to yourself, arcane recipes you read in your grandmother’s cookbook—elaborate dishes you’d never cook, because you could tell at a glance the results would be disgusting: meat loaf in aspic, minced veal in aspic, tuna noodle casserole in aspic. And you were wrong, or you were right, but let’s not get into that at present because I happen to know for a fact that you’re a good cook, although you can only make three dishes. But you are good at those three dishes, which I like. Either way, you once were a child and you disappeared every Friday evening into the land of ideal lizards, where you saw a lot of lizards, and you did things with the lizards, and now you’ve forgotten what you did, but I remember, and this is why you’re so frightened of lizards. You think they despise you and that they are dreaming of taking revenge. Which they probably are.

&n
bsp; But none of this gets at what I really want to tell you, which is what happened to our good friends Thomas and Janice. Remember them? It’s quite all right if you do not. We knew them a century ago, when we were still living in Bloomington-Normal and yes, all right, it wasn’t a century ago, but that’s what it feels like. I swear I’m much older than you think and you have to admit that when I first met you I let slip—I didn’t mean to, but out it drooled—that I’m not human, that I am something other than human, something primordial and perturbed, something inhuman and nonhuman and inhumane—there isn’t a word that really captures what I am, that nails down my essence. So when I say that I feel older than you, or that time doesn’t pass for me at the same rate it does for a mortal like you, you have to know that there is something behind my words, some truth to my statement. But let’s quit talking about that because I’m getting distracted, and you know how I get whenever I get distracted; it never goes well for the neighbors’ children or their Chihuahua or the goldfish I keep in the sink. Or our wedding album. Janice and Thomas, have you recalled them? Can you perform the incantation that causes their faces to swim to mind, can you picture their faces? Maybe you can, and maybe you can’t. After all it was centuries ago in Blormal, a place that I hope will be wiped from the globe by time and disease and financial crises and Republicans and an asteroid and the sterile fire of God, should that malignancy ever return. But at the moment Blormal’s still present; its people still shuffling back and forth along on Jefferson Boulevard, where we lived in our little house, or else in the downtown of Normal proper, reading the Pantagraph at the Coffeehouse and lining up for films at the refurbished movie theater, and riding banged-up bikes on the nature trail, the Constitution Trail, looking out of control but still managing not to hit you. I’ve set the scene and now it’s all coming flooding back, recollection trickling into your brain like cottage cheese that’s being pressed through a sieve, a milky white substance with air bubbles calmly rising in it, and those air bubbles are the fragile things we call memories. And two of those bubbles are Janice and Thomas, working late in the State Farm office that stands in downtown Bloomington proper like the priapus of a giant elder god who died in his sleep while he was sleeping on his back in the midst of a cornfield, eons ago. Janice and Thomas were working one evening as the sun set, the radioactivity of that star painting the western side of the State Farm Insurance building crimson orange, as is so common in the evening in the heartland. Janice and Thomas were the only two left in the office and as many as forty-five minutes had passed in silence when Thomas asked Janice a fateful question. And here you have to imagine the voice of a middle-aged man destroyed by decades of Marlboro Lights and shots of bourbon chased by cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, treats that Thomas permitted himself every night and sometimes during the daytime, during work, Thomas believing them his due:

  “Say!” (This is Thomas speaking to Janice; make sure you’re doing the raspy voice!) “Would you like to come over Thursday evening? Missy and I”—that’s Missy O’Mally, Thomas’s girlfriend of seventeen months—I hope you didn’t think Janice and Thomas were an item; they’re coworkers and we used to work with them, do you really not remember this? But I apologize for giving the wrong impression; I should be more precautious with you, really handle you with kid gloves as they say, that’s gloves that were made out of baby goats, dead baby goats, slaughtered baby goats, their skin is perfect for making gloves, and they’re the right kind of gloves for you. Thomas who never so much as kissed Janice was saying to Janice: “Missy and I are having some college friends over for dinner Thursday night, and as sure as you’re born, it would delight us to introduce you to the whole lot. I’ve already told them a lot about you.”

  “Really?” asked Janice.

  “As sure as you’re born,” repeated Thomas, who tended to overuse any phrase that he thought clever. “Tim and Bridget and Francis and Carol. And they’ve decided that they hate you, absolutely loathe your guts. They’d love to meet you, and humiliate you, and mock you, and spit in your face until your face is covered with spit, can’t hold more spit, then spit some more, and then some more. And then I was thinking that we could run you through with a poker, and disembowel you, and dismember you, chop you up into little bits, and grind those bits up in a blender, or else our brand-new garbage disposal, except for your organs, which we’ll barbecue and eat with dipping sauces for our meal.”

  Janice was tempted by Thomas’s offer. She was tempted to accept. She didn’t have very many friends, and those she had never asked her to dinner. So this was a banner day for Janice. You must remember what she was like, constantly sniveling and blowing her nose and making excuses for herself and crying profusely. We used to laugh at her whenever she left the room, and we sure as hell never invited her over for dinner at our place. “Well, I will see if I am free,” is what our darling good friend Janice sweetly said. She knew she’d be hungry come Thursday evening, that she’d be trapped fast in hunger’s jaw, that she’d be pinned by the bleached teeth of hunger, and that there’d be no food in the fridge. “I have to warn you, though,” she continued—and this is so typical of Janice, always continuing just when you thought she’d finished speaking—“that I’ve been busy as of late, thanks to the coming holiday season.” And here she was totally telling the truth, also typical of Janice: it was in fact the holiday season. Arbor Day was in three more weeks, and she was working her tight little tush off on a project for State Farm, seeing if she couldn’t invent an odorless gel that she could slip in a person’s coffee to make them anxious and want to pay more for their insurance premiums, like a thousand times more. I’d tell you the science if I happened to understand it, but I don’t, and I never will; I didn’t study math in college. It’s more important to describe what Janice was wearing, what bits of fabric she’d adorned herself with that day. How else can you properly picture this scene? Make notes if you need to: Janice was wearing a white-and-blue polka-dot cotton dress that did her body no real favors, as well as tights with sparkles in them, which was definitely a mistake. She’d swept her strawberry-blonde hair back with bobby pins that she had scavenged in the street. And of course she was wearing evening gloves to hide all the scars on her hands and forearms, but I don’t have to tell you that, because that’s her defining characteristic. (Have I mentioned that I hate her?)

  “Of course,” said Thomas, who for his part was wearing a tracksuit. I’ve never met anyone who loved tracksuits more than Thomas. He wore nothing but, even when cruising down the highway, pushing his candy-apple red Lamborghini to and past the limit, rocketing off to DeKalb and Peoria and Decatur to sell life insurance. He wore tracksuits even when going to church, even when representing himself in divorce court against his ghoul of a wife, even when working out at the gym (well, that makes sense), even when singing karaoke, even when huddled in the corner, alone and despondent, drunk and depressed, covered with cobwebs and downing his seventh Pabst Blue Ribbon for the evening. And even when laboring after hours at the office; his fondness for tracksuits was one of his many eccentricities that cannot be explained by modern science, no matter how many expensive lasers they aim at our brains. “I get what you’re saying. But if you cannot attend this Thursday, then perhaps some other time.” (Don’t forget to do the voice! You’re not doing the voice!)

  “I’ll certainly see what I can do,” Janice assured him, and you’ll remember how she was always assuring people, though they rarely were assured. “Your friends sound cool and really worth meeting—smarter than you, and far less boring.” Janice was thinking—here we are privy to her thoughts, a special privilege that we should treasure—“You most divine heavenly cow of a man, how can it be that until now I never thought of trying to slip my hand inside your sweatpants’ elastic waistband? For you are glittering in the sunset like a silver loving cup.” This you will doubtless find perplexing until I remind you that Janice always had a thing for abusive men, men who threatened to chop her up into little bits, men who preyed upon her
fervent love of hockey, instilled by a father who drank Jim Beam and beat his daughters if his favorite team, the Flyers, didn’t win the Stanley Cup, which they so often didn’t. Poor desperate Janice, poor delirious and pathetically lonesome Janice. I never liked her—I always hated her, tell the truth—but even still I’m not so unhuman that I can’t be moved by the grim pathos of her delusions. I may be an ancient malicious demon, but I still weep when confronted by persons such as that.

  In fact I was so moved on her behalf, let me tell you what I did. And here you’re getting an extra-special bonus insight because this is not yet public knowledge. Our old friend Thomas, he who wore nothing but tracksuits no matter what he was doing, our old friend Thomas no longer counts among the living. I strangled the arrogant bastard last week, I got so offended on poor frumpy Janice’s behalf. Because Lord knows she wasn’t ever going to do it, she’d never do anything with him, neither kiss him nor screw him nor kill him, despite his very real threat of bringing about her demise with his college friends (whom I’ll decline to describe in detail; suffice to say they are no more than leeks). What happened was I crept up from behind while he was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, his sixth of the evening, and I positioned my callused hands around his neck, and then I squeezed, then squeezed some more, then squeezed some more, until he had no more breath left inside him, and breathed his last. Then he expired and toppled over and he expired on the floor, the floor of the bar, a sticky surface that nobody looked at because they were drunk, which is what people are in bars, that’s why they go to bars in the first place, they go to drink alcohol and not have to look at floors, which is why bars are sordid places. Then I dragged Thomas out by his ankles and nobody noticed because again they were totally drunk, they had no idea what was going on, and that is why many consider drunkenness a sin. And I weighted Thomas’s tracksuited body down with copies of books that I’d been given by author friends that I had little interest in reading. The worst thing by far about being a writer is that people send you their books, and not even real books, but galley copies, uncorrected proofs that they want you to read and review, and that you can’t even sell for credit at your neighborhood used bookstore, because the galleys say right on their covers, “Not for resale.” And of course you don’t want to read these books because your friends don’t know how to write. Maybe one of them does for each dozen writer friends. It’s the pits. So I am always looking for things to do with these galleys, like seeing how tall a stack I can make with them, or throwing them hard as I can at passing cars, or weighting down the bodies of people whom I’ve strangled and want to dump in the nearest river. And so it was that Thomas drifted to the bottom of Bloomington’s shallow Sugar Creek accompanied by a bumper crop of small press offerings I’ll discreetly decline to name. The water was low that time of year and I have to admit that I’m surprised that no one has stumbled across his body—I mean, his corpse was barely submerged. But nobody seems to have missed the fellow, not even Missy, his so-called girlfriend of seventeen months, or the folks at the bar he was keeping in business. And just a few days ago the thin blue line of Bloomington discovered a rotting body, but it was somebody else’s corpse and they don’t know who it was, on account of its missing a face.