“How about those cinnamon rolls?” Jack says. “And some 34
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more whiskey, if you’ve got it.”
Nodding, I enter the kitchen. The swinging door settles, closing me off from the visitor. I lean against the refrigerator and close my eyes. The phone hangs on the wall across from me. I know that. To the right of the phone, and to the left of the electric stove, sits the tray of cinnamon rolls. In the cabinet above the stove, I know there’s another bottle of Knob Creek.
I open my eyes. It’s a bad idea to leave Mary passed out on the floor and alone with Jack, who has a rusted treble hook for a heart. Stepping across the small kitchen, I open the liquor cabinet, grab the bourbon, and with the other hand scoop up the cinnamon roll tray.
As I reenter the dining room, I drop the cinnamon rolls.
Where Jack sat now rests an elephant’s head. There is no body attached to the head, and the elephant head appears to have been born without flesh or turned inside-out.
“Sit on a boar,” says the elephant head. Its crackling voice possesses no qualities I associate with voices.
I sit on a boar and open the whiskey bottle. I pour a drink for myself. Even if the elephant head wants whiskey, I don’t how it could hold a glass without any arms or legs. I slam the bottle on the table a little too loudly and tip back my glass. I wipe away the whiskey that dribbles down my chin. Marybot groan-whirs on the floor. I hope she doesn’t wake up yet.
“Pour me a glass,” says the elephant head.
“What did you do with Jack?” I ask.
“I replaced him. Pour me a glass.”
“Tell me your name,” I say.
“They call me Ganesh,” says the elephant head.
I pour another glass of whiskey and slide it across the table.
“The same they that visited Jack?” I say.
“The ones who worship me,” Ganesh says.
The elephant’s trunk slaps and gropes around the table until it latches onto the glass. Suctioning onto the side, Ganesh lifts the glass above himself and then turns it over. Bourbon splashes 35
CAMERON PIERCE
over his red, meaty skull and drips onto the carpet. I realize that the elephant has no eyes and yet feel that Ganesh possesses some other sense that allows him to see, perhaps much more clearly than I myself can see. I catch myself thinking of the elephant head as a he.
I want to protest about the spilt bourbon. I want to rush down the hallway to where the shotgun rests, if only to splatter the wall with my own brain pulp. To forget.
The whiskey surges through me. It warms my belly while the trout refuses to settle. All in all, I felt the need to vomit up more than just the dinner. The entire evening, maybe, and maybe this entire life. Was this Ganesh speaking? Was this Ganesh controlling my thoughts?
“I haven’t killed a man,” I say. “You can’t get inside my head. I haven’t many of them and they don’t exist. None of you can hurt me.”
Ganesh laughs. The laughter possesses no qualities I associate with laughter. “I heard of a man you murdered. I may have spoken to him. He is the man you used to be.”
I recal what Marybot said. How different we had been when we first met, as if androids can change or grow (can’t they?). I shake my head. “It’s not a crime,” I say. “That’s life. Nobody could survive if they didn’t change. It’s cal ed adaptation. Humans would have never made it so far if we didn’t change. Hel , we probably would have died out during the ice age or something.”
Ganesh says, “The crime is that you believe in the lie. You are guilty of being human, and therefore you are guilty of murder. Middle-aged, Earth is now on her death bed. You are the reason, the sickness. Now you will shed your human shell and be remade in my image.”
In the kitchen, the phone rings.
“Hello?” I say.
After the caller blabbers on for a while, I set the phone 36
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down and walk out of the kitchen. “Ganesh, it’s for you,” I say.
At my feet, Marybot murmurs but does not move.
“But no one knows where I am,” Ganesh says.
“Maybe someone followed you,” I say. “Or at least they followed Jack, knowing you were inside him. Anyway, it’s for you.”The elephant head shifts uneasily in his seat.
I’d be willing to bet the elephant head is incapable of leaving the chair and too embarrassed to admit it. “Want me to take a message?” I say.
“Can you?” Ganesh says, sounding relieved.
In the kitchen again, I lift up the receiver. “Ganesh is busy.
He said to leave a message. Who is this?”
On a yellow notepad, I scribble a name, brief message, and address. Without saying goodbye, I hang up the phone. Before going back into the dining room, I open the fridge and grab two beers. I need something to take off the whiskey edge, not to mention this entire visitor fiasco. For the first time, I wish I was schizophrenic. To have been so blessed, like my younger brother Richard, and to have pills to numb the lunacy away.To have been so blessed.
Fuck blessedness.
“I got you a beer,” I say. I place the beer and yellow post-it note in front of the inside-out elephant head.
Ganesh’s trunk finds the note and slobbers on it for several minutes while I drink my beer and return to the fridge for another. When I come back to the dining room, Ganesh is splashing beer over his own head.
Discarding the can on the floor, Ganesh says, “I must go.
God has been taken hostage by guerillas in Africa.”
“That was God on the phone? What do the gorillas want with him? More bananas?” The message the caller left is utter gibberish, so he must be lying or bullshitting.
“Gueril as as in gueril a warfare. God is not Charlton Heston, and this is not Planet of the Apes. Help me from my throne.”
37
CAMERON PIERCE
“Can’t you turn back into Jack?” I ask.
“I am not Jack,” Ganesh says.
I recoil at the thought of putting my hands on the blood-slick beast. “It’s just that I wouldn’t be much help in getting you to—”
“Nevermind,” says Ganesh, cutting me off. “Can I have this boar?”
I’m almost drunk, but I realize that Ganesh is offering to leave, and so I tell Ganesh to have them all, have all the boars in the house.
“What would I do with so many boars?” Ganesh says.
“Could I ride them all at the same time? Could I build a Mount Krishna out of boars or a Boar Land for the children? Could I punish you for being stupid?”
“I just meant—”
“You cannot prevent me from taking this boar. I am immortal.”
I wonder what immortality has to do with stealing boars.
Probably not much, except drunk with my brother one time, around the onset of his illness, we dug up a tree from a grocery store parking lot and carried it home. The tree still lives in our parent’s backyard.
“Here I go,” Ganesh says, “taking the chair.”
“Go for it,” I tell him.
Ganesh raises his trunk and blows a kazoo sound. Black horses, scaly and legless, slither out from where his eyes should be. The two horses coil around the base of his trunk.
They open their mouths and blast flesh-textured rainbows into the boar, which melts into a four-legged puddle of coarse hair and taxidermy parts. Having apparently completed their duty, the horses slither up the elephant’s face and back through the pinkish, empty sockets. The boar puddle solidifies around Ganesh and the elephant head now possesses four spindly pig legs. Bowing, Ganesh wobbles to the living room’s front window and jumps out. The only 38
LOST IN CAT BRAIN LAND
evidence of a visitor is the broken glass.
And still, Marybot slumbers on the floor.
Shortly after Marybot regains consciousness, the phone rings again. It’s an old friend of hers from Dr. Blight’s labora
tory and she wants to have dinner tomorrow night. She wants to keep better contact with all her friends from back home, this android says. I tell Marybot no. We will not have this woman as a guest, not even for a single evening. I’m surprised when Marybot agrees with me. “All we need is each other,” she says, and squeezes me tight as the phone rings again.
It’s Bill. The last time I spoke to him was high school graduation. “Come on out for a beer,” he says. “I’m only in town for a night. You remember Jill Cassidy? We got married.
Are you married? Bring your wife if you’re married.”
“I’m sorry,“ I tell Bill, truly almost sorry, “but tonight is not a good night.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” he says.
I hang up the phone as Marybot leans against the kitchen counter, looking worried. Before either of us can say anything, the phone rings again. “You answer it this time,” I say.
She answers the phone without saying anything. The caller says something and then she hangs up.
“Who was it?” I ask.
But she won’t tel me. She turns away and wheels out of the kitchen. As I fol ow her down the hal way to our bedroom, the phone rings again. “Tel me who it was,” I cal , but she has already slammed the bedroom door and pushed in the button lock.
The phone rings all night. Marybot says nothing but I can hear her breathing when I put an ear against the door. We are too afraid to answer the phone anymore and too afraid to disconnect it. At some point, I walk into the kitchen and grab another beer 39
CAMERON PIERCE
from the fridge. The glowing numbers on the microwave catch my eye. It’s four in the morning and the phone continues to ring. For some reason this is enough to make me cry and I slump down against the base of the refrigerator and the phone rings and I sob louder than I have in a long time. The visitor is gone but the effects are just beginning. I don’t know how or why this is happening, let alone what is happening, and this makes me more afraid. I think Marybot knows something, or maybe the caller after Bill said something, and I hope that soon she will come out of the bedroom so we can make some order out of this mess. If we have to disconnect the phone, we disconnect the phone, and if it takes something else, then by god we’ll do it because this is our life. If we let go of each other then all we’ve got is this being afraid, but maybe it is too late now to ever pick up again without being afraid. We’ve got to hold on. Without the consolation of warm machines, who would we be when we look out the window at dawn? How would we know that’s who we are, or is it already too late for that?
40
DEATH OF A
DOG EATER
Pike passes the sign-in sheet to the lady on his left. He stands.
The fold-up chair beneath him scrapes against the floor. He waves at the people sitting in chairs. “My name is Pike Fischer,”
he says. His forehead and underarms drip sweat.
“Hi Pike,” the people say.
“How can we help you this evening, Pike?” says Deidra, a mid-fifties woman with a badge that says CHORDINATOR
pinned to her red overalls.
“I like to eat dogs,” Pike says.
The crowd gasps.
“This isn’t Dog Eaters Anonymous,” Deidra says. Her eyes glow red. Deidra is a robot. “Do you have a problem with alcohol? We are here to help people struggling with alcohol.”
Pike licks his lips. He reaches for the lip balm in the pocket of his frayed jeans. He applies cherry-scented lip balm as he says, “I eat dogs.”
“Dog eater!” A John Candy look-alike rips a fake beard off his face and approaches Pike.
“Sit down, Ronnie,” Deidra says.
Ronnie throws the beard in the air and swings at Pike, but he misses. Pike fal s to the floor anyway. The fake beard lands on his 41
CAMERON PIERCE
face. Ronnie grabs his own chest and collapses next to Pike.
“He’s having a heart attack!” somebody shouts.
“Seize the dog eater!” somebody else shouts.
They lift Pike off the floor. He applies lip balm. He came here to get help, not kill people.
The people release Pike.
“Yuck,” somebody says.
“He smells,” somebody else says.
They run away pinching their noses. Pike is happy that he can’t smel himself. Otherwise he would probably be dead. But he’s sad that he emits an odor so terrible that sometimes it kills people.
“Leave,” Deidra says, “and never come back to this place!”
She’s the only one remaining in the room with Pike.
“I need help,” Pike says.
“Get out before I call the police.”
Pike leaves the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He feels dejected and angry. “Stupid recovering alcoholics,” he says. He wipes his eyes, then gets a good idea. He smears lip balm on his eyelids. He feels just like an overstuffed vacuum bag, happy that he tried, hoping for another shot.
He gets in his car.
He drives his car down Gosford Lane.
He stops at a red light.
He turns on the radio.
He turns off the radio.
The light turns green.
“Green means go,” he says.
He works up the nerve to go.
He goes.
He’s in the middle of the four-way intersection when a truck speeds through the red light and smashes into the side of his car.
Sometimes a minute takes an hour to pass.
The ambulance is bright. It takes Pike away.
“I’ve got you babe,” he shouts.
The ambulance people are freaked out a little bit. Pike 42
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isn’t thinking about them. He is thinking about the dog in his freezer. “I’ve got you babe,” he shouts. He can practically taste the terrier’s frozen eyes.
“Some people deserve to be sick and wounded,” one of the ambulance people says.
“Some people belong in the hospital,” says the other.
It takes one listen of The Cure’s Love Song to arrive at the hospital.
They pull up to the emergency doors and take Pike out of the ambulance. He is very worried about all the blood spilling out of him. He is also worried because the ambulance people are trying to soak it up with paper towels.
“Don’t you have anything better?” he says.
“These are double absorbent,” one of the ambulance people says.“Double,” says the other.
“You don’t need to emphasize it,” the first ambulance person says. “Surely he knows what double absorbent means.”
“You always say something twice when it refers to a deuce.
Oreo Double Stuffs? Double. Double the trouble? Double.
Double Mint Gum? Double.”
“Double shut up before I double punch you in the double mouth.”
“Double. Double. Double.”
“Double, double! Double, double!”
The ambulance people break into a slapping fight. Pike feels very dizzy. His elbows tingle. He licks his lips and closes his eyes.
When the world moves so fast, time and space cease to matter.
We’re standing alone in a room with death, and we have always stood in that room. With dead dogs crawling up the walls. Grinning dead dogs. Our dead dogs.
In Heaven, Pike Fischer marries a poodle. He sets out to relive the same horrors all over again.
43
THE
DEPRESSED MAN
A man walks into a grocery store. He forgot his shopping list at home. He picks up a green basket and walks into the produce section. The lighting hurts his eyes. Fruits and vegetables rot, he thinks. He will not buy them. He gazes at potatoes and wonders if other shoppers notice his apathy toward them.
The man wanders into the bread aisle. Bread must have been on his grocery list. He usually enjoys sandwiches, but he will not buy bread. He has not enjoyed sandwiches for some time. Protein will boost his
morale. He walks away from the bread.
He shuffles up and down the aisles of meat and shakes his head. He doesn’t know where to begin. Should he purchase organic free range meat and evade the guilt he feels when he supports factory farms? He is not a rich man. He cannot afford humane meat. He wonders if any meat is humane.
Anyway, he has trouble digesting meat. He feels bad enough.
He feels nothing, although he drank too much coffee today.
The man wishes he never entered the store. He could have turned back in the parking lot. Now it is too late. He must purchase something. He considers purchasing a chocolate bar, but he doesn’t like chocolate. He walks away from the meat 44
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and the next thing he knows, he is staring at children’s cereal.
The man used to like cereal. He wonders what happened. He tries to remember the last time he ate cereal. I wonder if it is normal for grownups to eat cereal with cartoon rabbits on the box, he wonders. The man cannot think about this. The light hurts his eyes.
The man will buy beer. He came to the grocery store for food, but he probably has food at home. He must have felt bored. Everything he used to love now bores him. Grocery shopping seemed like a good idea, but it was a bad idea. His ideas get worse every day.
He finds the beer section. The choices overwhelm him.
Buying beer no longer seems like a good idea. He sets his grocery basket on the tile and turns to leave. It’s a wonder he ever left the house.
As the automatic doors slide open, he remembers that people love him. He considers phoning some of these people, but he doesn’t. Calling people takes energy and he has been tired for so long he doesn’t care anymore.
The man sits at the bus stop. He will go home and lie in bed. He might be ill. If he isn’t ill, he might become so. One should never take a potential illness lightly.
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