A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  But as I was saying, here and now—that boring evening in the priapus that is State Farm—Janice was lusting after Thomas, and considering his offer. A familiar face filled her vision, the familiar face of hunger. She’d eaten that day—she ate every day; she was exceedingly clever that way—but from her experience she knew that, come Thursday evening, she would have to eat again. So she was tempted. But something about the way Thomas was acting deeply upset her, it mixed her up, and not knowing how else to respond, she struck his honey-colored mug with the fat of her hand, and it proved a doozy of a blow. Janice had been working out after work, the tricky gosling. Indeed, she didn’t know her own strength. The strike caught Thomas by surprise, knocking him backward onto the floor, the linoleum floor, the unswept and unmopped linoleum floor, where he at once started getting filthy. You can imagine the bacteria that started crawling on him and reproducing. As for her own part, crying, Janice clumsily fled to the nearest custodial closet, where she consoled herself by reading the complex ingredients in the many cleaning solutions that were stored there. We should show some respect for her feelings and permit her to take a breather.

  OK, that’s more than enough time for Janice. But she still hasn’t emerged from the closet. Maybe she’s getting OSHA-compliant, scrubbing her forehead with foaming hand soaps, or squirting Windex into her hair, or trying on overalls and galoshes and vinyl gloves. That might be a good look for Janice; it might make her look very nice. Or maybe she’s taking out her frustrations on her fingers, bending her pinkies back until they snap in half, like the medieval jailers did. I never followed the lady home and couldn’t tell you what she was into, but she was obviously into something, poor old Janice, poor old unhappy, impoverished Janice. I never liked her as I’ve mentioned more than once; she was a mess but it wasn’t her fault, not entirely her fault. Her bones fit together much too snugly and her joints grated when she walked, producing a high-pitched shriek you heard without knowing what it was, a whine tucked away in the back of your mind that you barely realized was there and that you sure as hell couldn’t drown out with other sounds. Which was very aggravating.

  Speaking of which, did I tell you about the play I watched? Last Saturday afternoon, in one of the underground theaters for which the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago is justly famed. The first half was boring and I didn’t like that half. I got so bored that I got up to poke around backstage, inspecting the ropes and pulleys and bridges everywhere. There was more stuff than I thought any theater needed, but it was a secret professional theater and they must know what they’re doing. I did some theater as a child but that was a thousand years ago and I’ve mostly forgotten my training and can’t claim expertise.

  In the second half of the play, a person, Garoo, was beating his friend. This intrigued me. Garoo was wearing a ratty bathrobe that kept coming loose. The sash, I mean, kept coming untied. And the bathrobe was covered in eucalyptus and menthol stains. Garoo had a thing about eucalyptus, kept smearing his face and hands with this gel that came in unlabeled sample bottles. In the first half of the play, he had a monologue where he swore—but only half jokingly, I think—that he’d been a koala in a past life. And in the second half he kept hitting and kicking his friend, Aaron Alexander, who just went by Alexander, and the beating looked so real that I worried for Alexander’s sake. I thought his skull might split in half, and that his brain might come flying out, and plop on the stage, and no longer work. I don’t know how they made the violence look so convincing.

  I’ll back up and tell you about Garoo, who looked like cheese. He looked a hell of a lot like cheese, an awful lot like some strange Swiss-cheddar-Colby blend. He had yellow-orange skin and an overall mushy look, as though if you squeezed him, grabbed his forearm and really gave it a squeeze, his flesh would come apart in clumps in your hands. Plus he emitted a cheesy aroma. It was difficult to distinguish in his case the regular pungent human odor from, say, a Camembert or a Brie or a Vieux Boulogne. Garoo was sensitive about this, quick to freak out if you asked him if his mother had been a cheese, or if you simply mentioned cheese, or simply said anything that sounded too much like a cheese pun. He’d push his cheesy face up in your face and scream till white spittle flew out of his mouth, spit like shredded mozzarella, while thick sweat oozed down his puffy cheeks like melting Velveeta. And then he’d threaten to punch your face and kick your shins. And you might wonder whether this soft cheese of a man would follow through on either threat, or cause any damage if he did; that’s fair enough. I don’t know for certain but I wouldn’t press my luck: some parts of his body had a rind, and I imagine those parts could scratch you, or give you a rash.

  Alexander was close friends with Garoo and chose his words extremely carefully and never mentioned cheese. He was a vegan and a gentleman. So why did Garoo flip out and attack him? Well, our coagulated friend accused Alexander of “licing his socks”—that’s dumping handfuls of lice in his socks—right before the intermission. He leaped on a table and pointed his finger, which looked like a cheese curd, right in Alexander’s direction, and screamed in a voice like queso fundido, “You put tons of lice in my Smartwool socks, the pricey ones from REI!” Then the curtain tumbled down and I did my snooping around backstage, which took me a while and by the time I got back to my seat, Act II had started, and Garoo was busy whaling away at Alexander. I asked my neighbors what I’d missed, and they said nothing so far but fighting. The tussle went on for a good long while, looking disturbingly real, as I’ve mentioned. Meanwhile, people appeared onstage behind the fight, background extras, lithe men and women in blue-gray leotards and tights and papier-mâché masks that looked like fish. These dancers bobbed up and down and looked back and forth very quickly, producing a singular effect, as though the stage were slowly flooding, the fight occurring underwater. And all of those pulleys I’d seen went to work, lowering oversized starfish and clams, and oysters and lobsters, as well as a mermaid combing her hair and actual jellyfish, en masse onto the stage, until the undersea illusion was complete. Then all the lights dimmed and the curtain came down very slowly, extremely slowly, and that was the end of Act II and the play for all I cared. I’d lost any interest.

  I ripped up my ticket and went for a walk down Logan Boulevard, the knife that runs through the heart of Logan Square. I heard the drunken owls hooting and the moonlight scream my name but I didn’t stop; I already knew what nature wanted. Every window in every building on Logan B. was shot out or broken, long lethal shards of glass coating the sidewalk. I made a mental note about that; someone would have to sweep them up. What gets done with all those broken shards of glass is beyond me. I’ve heard that truly desperate Chicagoans grind them up and try to snort the powder like cocaine, and you can imagine how that goes—it’s why the gutter is full of blood. Others melt them down in order to make new glass, a complex process they call fornication.

  My mind was beating a mile a minute, as restless as a rhino getting Tasered. The earth felt alive beneath my feet, which might have had something to do with the earthworms. All my life, I’ve had the suspicion that earthworms will mutate and enlarge and grow poisoned fangs, then smash through the pavement, thick as forearms, and start chasing us, like giant killer elongated boogers. Or else the trees will take their revenge for all they’ve suffered. I’ve recently learned that when people climb trees, they’re trying to reach an ornate gem that nonetheless manages to elude them, but that’s not my point: the trees don’t care for such behavior, and they want to harm us, all of us people, which is why they’re planning to strike us with their branches, and stuff their needles and pine cones and fruits (if they produce fruits) and nuts and seeds up everyone’s nostrils. But if you die in your sleep before August 17, 2019, you won’t have to deal with any of this, and in the meantime I’m still considering what to do with this explosive information.

  I got to thinking about a cartoon I used to watch, starring a man named Saul the Gaul. In this one episode that’s always haunted me, Saul befriends an im
p that wore a gargoyle mask and proudly displayed its mangled sex to half the nation. This was how that imp caught people, overly curious civilians that it stored in plastic boxes. It serenaded the people it trapped with delicate songs about skunks in love while its captives slowly starved. The imp insisted those deaths weren’t its fault. Saul meanwhile was determined to strangle a bear, believing that feat well within his cartoon capacity.

  All this and more was on my mind while I trudged along Logan Boulevard, past New Wave Coffee, past the Starbucks, en route to the overpass at Western, and then the Target and the Lathrop Homes beyond that. It’s odd where one’s mind disappears to at dusk, oozing out of the skull through the grotesque eye in the back of one’s head, and alighting on northerly winds like a flaming crystal eagle. It flies to the forces beyond our control, the gods who can play with our minds as they wish, give our brains sponge baths or massage them with their feet. We couldn’t stop them if we tried, even if we knew this was going on, which of course we do not. It’s like this is happening in our sleep and all our memories are like boogers—long, stringy earthworms dangling freely from a random stranger’s nose. You try to hand the stranger your handkerchief but he or she ignores you, more concerned with questions you don’t know how to answer, like “When a celebrity signs a baseball surely it raises that baseball’s value, but by how much?” And then your Amazonian boss strides up to your cubicle and demands a finished report on which of the cardinal numbers are “the squiggliest” and you open your mouth to respond, but find you’ve forgotten what numbers are, and you can’t say.

  Soppy, sweet Janice is still barricaded inside that janitorial closet, doing who knows what amidst the mops and the mousetraps and the sponges, and I think we have to conclude that she’s not coming out. She’s disappeared, just like a child escaped to the land of ideal lizards. Janice is still young enough to go there if she wants, if she tries with all her heart and if the lizards are feeling gracious. So let’s imagine that they are because that’s a very pleasant thought. Janice has nothing to live for on this side of the divide, so she might as well spend the remainder of her days among the lizards, learning their language and helping them lay their eggs and reboot their routers and modems—they have their own internet and it’s blisteringly fast, much faster than any network we’ve built. Janice could study to be an information technician, and barring that, she could scoot around patting all the lizards on their heads, if they happen to like that. It’s not the career I’d choose for myself but I’ve had better options, opportunities both educational and financial, while Janice has always been handed squat. Fortune avoided her like a biker on a trail, so maybe she’s better off turned green and eating quiche—if you live on that side, your skin turns green, and there is nothing to eat but quiche. But why am I telling you any of this? You’ve been there yourself, and you know more about the lizards than I ever could. We won’t be seeing Janice again so I hope you imagined her very clearly, got an eyeful.

  And as for the child, the one on the beach, I’d nearly forgotten all about him. And now I’ve forgotten all about him. I hope he got free, that things went well for him and badly for the man who was trying to trap him. Fiction should always follow the law and bring its evildoers to justice. So let’s agree that’s exactly what happened: the child escaped and the grown-up got stuck inside his own trap, got locked inside that dark concrete bunker. He’s now sitting quietly on the sand, reflecting on how the thing he did was exceedingly wrong. He has nothing to eat and as the day comes to an end, he’s growing chilly. He might have to spend a few more days all on his lonesome, as well as a few more days after that, as much as a week. Maybe in seven days’ time he’ll have learned a significant lesson and vowed to turn over a new leaf. And if not, well, who really cares? The world is full of losers and fools and if he wants to join their ranks, he’s welcome to do so. We can ignore him for years, for centuries if need be. We have so many others to think about and inspect. Like Margaret and Sheila: Margaret was showing Sheila her new mask, a lightweight object made of yarn. She could attach it to her face by means of small silver hooks she’d inserted into her bones. “My old mask was pinching too much,” she explained, “but this new one, being sateen, is looser.” Gaily she modeled the delicate good and wouldn’t you know it, Margaret wasn’t lying to Sheila. There was a certain truth to that.

  The Fisherman Bombardier of Naval Station Norfolk

  A Performance in Four Generations, Three Races, and Too Many Genders to Name

  Quintan Ana Wikswo

  —For Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, and Rose LaRose

  In this mariner’s damp the lichen sprouts, or rather creeps, in the manner molds and kisses do, prurient. Slightly closer then farther toward and away from their undisclosed destination. Investigating, guarded, but unwilling to cease from exploration.

  Sun, perhaps, is for the suicidal ones. And the rotten logs are for the whore molds—whore spores of all kinds, honorable and excoriable, seductive and repulsive, venal and venereal and Venetian, Vesuvian, Venusian, exquisitely fantastic whores—some with scales, some with soft, striped skin, slick.

  After all, for centuries the navy ran a red-light ghetto here called the Pussy Stockade, inhabited by many of my ancestors, who were rich until they died, highly venereal. And I owe them something, a stalking, a haunting, along the decaying quay at sunset. I have come here to investigate, in my way, the lichen that I feel slips from my viscera in the darkness. Quays and whores and sailors make fine company as ghosts. All dripping wet, all specters of the slimy sea.

  And it was in that way, driven by curiosity, I went walking on the quay at sunset, where good things never happen, depending upon the interpretation of goodness as asset or as liability. I am wearing a preposterous reproduction of a nineteenth-century courtesan corset and a hoop skirt.

  There is a why for this, and I shall elaborate.

  The sense of the perpendicular rib cage comforts me. When I am walking on the quay at sunset I know that my ribs are encased by other ribs, prone, recumbent, the secretive grave ribs of the Norfolk whores in my family. Supine, and as disquisitive about me, I suspect, as I am about them. But to a questioning bystander I would of course reply that the baroque aristocractic decadence of my corsetry is instead a matter of practicality—they are utilitarian even, because I have slipped on the slimy stairs and fractured my spine, and without the corsets I am instructed to lie on my back—otherwise the ripped tendons and ligaments and tiny slivers of bone would return to the celestial brew of heavy elements and fetid slime, hidden tastefully beneath bruised skin.

  Why have bruises become so fascinating in this context? Their near spectral appearance—the surprise one doesn’t expect after impact, yet knew all along was coming. The fifth horsewoman, an Amazon, is the bruise; only one breast, and sharp points in her quiver. Violet, chartreuse, dead blood are the colors of licentiousness and mildew. Erotic in its refusal to comply, yet its malleability. There is the curiosity of what will emerge from a wound that initially leaves no trace. There is the knowledge that a future examination is forthcoming. The flesh remains full and soft, and its darkly nacreous sneer reminds one that as sweet and wounded as it may seem, it will remain until it decides itself to depart. Typically in a follicular haze of mustard, a chlorine gas held tight beneath the skin.

  And this corset is violet and rose madder shot silk, as they used to say here during the various wartime embargoes, when privateers smuggled the prized silk from Paris on pain of being shot. And it is totally inappropriate attire for the quay at sunset in a naval town on the day the NATO aircraft carrier comes home from the Barents Sea. This century, at least, I feel the obligation to haunt—after all, the Russians have returned. We are repeating history, and I feel obligated to ritualize the repetition.

  Why walk Genet’s quay looking for a love fight if I can’t do so tied into vertical strips of steel? I am an iron-clad battleship armed with tits. The steel bands run perpendicular to my fractured ribs, but no one need kn
ow that except for my dog, the Brussels griffon bred to belong in a courtesan’s carriage in the Bois de Boulogne like any other undersized Belgian ratcatcher who looks cute in his wee goatee until one feels his fangs.

  And combat boots nearly to my thighs, too large by far, and inappropriate because I know of no other way to behave except inappropriately when I intend humanity only good. When I intend humanity only good, I haunt it with the most humane of traps. I am mistaken for a ghost. They fall into the netherworlds of time, they flail, I watch and like any wayward Gretel they are rewarded before being kindly savored with a spoiled Madeira and returned to the twenty-first century, only slightly damaged.