by Tony Burgess
Mendez bounces his finger quickly across his mouth, dicing his lower lip into bite-sized pieces, and as he slips one of these pieces back between his teeth, his face brightens across the rearview mirror. As he speaks his breath condenses across the lower part of the mirror and his excitement grows. He reaches up dramatically and clutches the mirror, dropping its angle until his eyes meet their reflection. He appears to be holding a party mask between his thumb and finger, or at least he regards it this way and speaks to this effect.
“It’s not the ampersand, really now is it, Mendez, my old friend. It was never the ampersand, not in nature, there are no ampersands in nature. No, the ampersand will simply not occur naturally. The little bunny isn’t ‘and’ a little bunny, a little burnt brown snagged in its own barbed shadow. No, the natural flow — the national flower — is the hyphen! Look at it, here, in front of me! From flower to flower like a little furry-bottomed rutting Jesus, hops my bunny, pulled towards itself by the empty space it pursues. You see: a rapid happy bunny. I will paint the hyphen! Wait for me, my theme-damp partners, your stories stacked like cord wood, there’s a bunny among them!”
Mendez’s hand pauses open around the mirror and he waits for the elastics to snap the mask back onto his face. He screws up his eyes anticipating the slap of plastic against his cheeks.
★
Around the base of Ron’s cock runs a tiny ring of crabs. They fight each other here, where their population is densest. Like microscopic bumper cars they attempt to flip each other over by forcing their serrated bronze foreheads painfully up each other’s asses. Beneath their furious legs a forest of stumps — the detached anchors of the vanquished — gives them footing. A sparer, nomadic population moves across the drier parts of Ron’s body, with their thinner, lighter shells they graze along in his armpits and eyebrows, respectful of their neighbour’s space. Here and there, in the fold of an elbow or down the shiny bridge of his nose, lone super crabs race their outsized bodies around single baby hairs, raising blood into the follicles, from which they paint their feet like ghoulish socks.
Ron is clearing a space on the couch for Ray Bird. He piles empty journals that are embossed delicately with spaghetti, onto splattered, empty plates, plates so neglected they cry when he touches them. He drapes his long arm across the back of the couch, switching on the Cowboy lamp as he settles against the stiff orange upholstery. Ray bows gently, nervously, as he slides three stiff canvases from a portfolio case, placing them, in lieu of himself, on the couch
“Here’s a sample of what these boys are painting, this one’s a Peter Beer, and that one, that one’s a Carl Poultice and this one up here is a John Mendez, actually Dr. John Mendez. He has a practice right here in town. All original paintings by original painters. What do you think, Ron, pretty nice, eh?”
The painting nearest to Ron depicts a barn and a cedar rail fence — a million other paintings exactly like it and a million other painters utterly unlike Peter Beer are sealed off just beneath its surface. One detail grabs Ron’s eye. On the muddy road leading up to the barn is a boy lying flat on his face with his one arm stretched behind his back as he points off to something that he can’t possibly see and hasn’t been included in the painting. The figure looks awkward and stiff, out of place, wrong. Ron purses his gorgeous full lips.
“This here painting.”
“Ah, yes, the Beer.” Ray bends over the coffee table to examine the painting more closely.
“Yeah, this one. What exactly is wrong with this little boy down here on the road?”
“Well, I don’t actually know. I see him there, he kinda looks like he fell down, doesn’t he?”
Ron drags a thumbnail hard across the top of his pubic hair, just below the towel wrapped around his waist, causing his puckered navel to tip delightfully.
“No, look, this arm here, he’s pointing at something.”
Ray squints his eyes. He’s not looking at the boy. He doesn’t need to. He’s looked at it many many times.
“Well, Ron, this is more than just a painting, we’re caught in the story and what exactly has happened and what will happen depends on where you’re sitting. For instance, it looks to me like this little boy here might have just happened to step in front of the painter while he was in the middle of his work and maybe he was messin’ around — distracting him — and the painter just picked up a big old rock and beaned this kid.”
Ron scratches the back of his neck with the fury of a porch dog, inadvertently causing his nipples to pop up like glistening treats.
“Seems a bit odd that he’d then paint him.”
“Well, Ron, like any great painter Beer’s taken this perfectly natural occurrence — the painful prostration of this child — and transformed it into something allegorical. By including it in a landscape he begins, you know, to allegorize the setting, and everything becomes an allegory. You see? Or you could read this as a sign of the birth of the baby Jesus, and maybe the child is painfully trying to point at the artist but can’t, saying, ‘J’accuse, J’accuse.’ Or maybe because the artist threw the first stone, beaning this child, and he’s saying … You know. I don’t know. Something like that. I just think this painting keeps giving.”
Ron’s hand dives violently down the back of his towel and he saws at the cleft between his buttocks catching his ring against the back of his scrotum.
“Ow! Shit! Ow! Holy Mother! Ow! Ow!”
Ron doubles over cupping his silken genitals in his hands, causing Ray to jump back and slam one stack of journals onto another.
“Christ! Are you alright? Jesus, are you OK?”
Ron sits up suddenly and exhales through full cheeks as he squeezes his powerful thighs together.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. Sorry, Jesus, I guess I scratched myself there.”
Ray lowers himself into a chair, feeling something sticky holding the back of his shirt. He flips a spoon from between his legs to the floor. It bounces noisily from a dish and spins under a tunnel in the carpet.
“OK Ron, as you can see, these paintings are real conversation pieces; that Mendez, for instance, is full of tricks. These ones here are $200 a pop, which is a damn good investment. Why don’t I just leave them with you here for the weekend, and then you can spend a bit of time with them, and I’ll come back Monday and we can talk. Waddayasay?”
Ron smiles anxiously as he claws at his armpits.
“Ray, that sounds fine.”
Ray motions to Ron to remain seated as he let himself out. When he’s gone Ron flings himself face down on the couch, jerking his body against its coarse fibres, shuddering with the sudden pleasure of a full body scratch, as he feels the room start to spin. On the front porch, Ray smiles to himself, and shakes his head as he pokes a finger through a hole in his pants pocket to scratch his groin.
★
A great weight awaits Ray in his car, a weight that every living creature feels. It is the weight of irrecoverable debt. There is no peace of mind for Ray. Every night before he falls asleep beside Paula, holding her forearm like a rope, he winces against her back, trying to squeeze away his panic — his fear that she will be woken in the middle of the night, like she was three weeks ago, by his ragged panting. Ray knows that somewhere in the city, maybe in different places simultaneously, strangers who have been hired to hold Ray in contempt, are plotting his embarrassing public capture. Ray can see them, sniffing little skip tracers who’d rather give a baby measles than give up the chase, creating little patches of ice across Ray’s world, waiting for him to fall. And when he falls, his hip painfully snapped and his spinal cord severed cruelly close to the base of his neck, the collection devil will slip his hand into Ray’s inside pocket, shredding a five dollar bill while he giggles at the bet he’s just won.
A list of debts as endless as a velcro highway against stocking feet lies before him, a half-dozen bills overdue, another half-dozen alr
eady in a tray on some collector’s clammy little desk.
And loans, loans, loans. And the bank, the bank, the bank, the bank, the bank, the bank, the bank.
Each of these debts hangs from a hook in Ray’s body. They’re the medals for bravery that all fuck-ups take with them when they die. As he pulls at the part in his hair and examines the lower half of his face in the rearview mirror what, really, is the commitment he makes? A thousand tough guys cock their jaws to the east, in the barber shop between Ray’s eye and this mirror. The mirrors are repositioned — the sideview hangs out dangerously from the blue cliff-face it reflects, driving a strip of aluminum down quickly. It hangs out beneath the trees scratching their glass. A hand heavy with rings adjusts the rearview. It finds the rear window, and together the mirrors begin to count the summer vehicles that pass through at right angles.
All of this gloom, and this is no joke, and the tiny provocations that make even the shallowest of waters lethal, have anchored Ray in this driveway with less gas than he needs to drive home. He is sitting here acting ready, pushing himself up into the seat against his commitment. The summer traffic continues to split its speed up through the mirror surfaces that hang in this hot car like tinted ice cubes. And occasionally they slow down — why not? — and a little boy with a dinosaur tattoo, says, “Bye Ray, Mommy look it’s Mr. Bird. Bye-bye Ray Bird.” And Mommy turns in time to say, “Honey, shhhhh,” and the next car drives by and then another. But this isn’t all; really, this is nothing. Ray has felt like he does now, all his life; tolerating his own unwelcome defining moments, with his arms folded and his eyelids slowing, as he says to himself, “Show me something I don’t know.” Some people live their entire lives waiting out a cruel embarrassment that will never move on. They are doomed to exhaustion. Ray is one of them. But right this instant Ray has a peculiar resource — an eye, his eye, is blinking low on the horizon perched on a thin bank of clouds. And he slips into it, the wet, black tumbling pupil and the warm veins radiating above his head high in the apse, and he reclines, with his heel lodged in the suction of a tear duct, and he watches from here, in a place utterly uncommon to analogy, far from the as yet undiscovered basketball-sized eggs that have begun to swing on his pubic hair, paying people the money he owes them and feeling a growing curiosity — now that the view is allowed — now that it really doesn’t matter anymore — but why, he wants to know — why is the population of Bewdley so exclusively male?
“Hey, Ray, Ray Bird?”
A man in a white T-shirt and turquoise shorts smiles up into his bushy grey moustache, extending an arm through the window. Ray jumps and turns the key in the ignition with less commitment, however, than it would take to actually start the engine.
“Hiya Ray. I’m Bob McCarty, I run the antique store out on Highway 22, you might of heard of it, Other Things from Other Times?”
Ray winces as he bares his teeth, smiling while a frisbeesized parasite twists a bayonet deep into the tingly swamp below his waist.
“Here’s my card, Ray. Anyway, I hear you’re representing our lads here in Bewdley.”
Ray brushes the hair on his forearm, furrowing his brow at a stone under the wiper.
“Yeah, I do, I represent them.” Ray feels he must say more. “I also represent couple other galleries in Toronto. Here’s my card, Airtight Originals.”
Ray regrets revealing this information immediately. In the past year he has sold numerous works of art, sculptures mostly, without informing the artists, without informing anyone at all, to help pay for his business partner’s AZT treatments. Unfortunately when the partner died, so did the ‘us’ in an ‘us against them,’ ‘all or nothing’ campaign to stick it to the Man. Ray had been suddenly faced with the uncomfortable fact that the Man, the ‘them’ of us and them, was a hapless gang of poor sculptors. These sculptors have since upgraded their status as a them, with the help of a couple of detectives, and the Man is now busily restoring order.
“Listen, I think it’d be rather alright if you hung some of those paintings in my shop. I got wall space, about ten by five feet. I just move the stuffed musky over to the far wall and we’ve got the beginnings of a little salon. Waddayasay?”
Ray’s been nodding mechanically through all this, and since it has become anatomically impossible for him to say no, ever, he simply widens his eyes.
“Yeah right, so hey, I just think it’s so exciting that Bewdley’s own little ménage à trois may be getting some recognition. Compared to Pickering, where I got my start in the antique business, Bewdley is turnin’ out to be some kinda spot on the map. I guess those Mendez paintings are gonna have to be worth something now, eh?”
Ray zigzags his jaw back and forth, closing one eye.
“Jeez, I guess you haven’t heard. You know those sirens went off a while back? Well, seems a hunting dog attacked our poor Mendez, mangled up his wrist real bad, and I guess he was in shock or something, but he drives himself home, gets into a bath, and starts sewing himself back up. No, this is just crazy shit. The poor guy must of doped himself up somethin’ awful ’cause he falls asleep in there, and get this, now he’s stuck in the tub. I guess he’s got some big hips on him ’cause the fire department’s over there right now trying to pull him out. If he doesn’t make it, god forbid, you can draw a little clover on this business card of yours.”
It begins to dawn on Ray, as he sits there half listening, that there really are things crawling on him. He feels the unmistakable sensation of a tiny limb elbowing its way between a crease in his belly.
★
Ron Jeremy, by far the sexiest man in this small town, is standing naked at his front window, absentmindedly tugging the soft cuff of his cock. He has made an appointment to see the doctor this afternoon and now he’s bracing himself, preparing himself, gathering strength. Ron hasn’t left his filthy little house for eight months. A very real, very profound terror of open spaces, of anywhere other than here, has kept this man attached from the waist down, like a centaur, to his couch. It’s fairly useless to talk now about history or depression or conflicting stories. All of these things are rotting like the window that sags away from his fists as he hangs his arms off the drapes. The phone rings and Ron thinks it must be the doctor’s office confirming his appointment. He crumples the drapes up against his ears, afraid of the noise, afraid of what it will do and sure enough after each ring falls into its own silent space thousands of tiny mad cows stimulated by the mild flush of blood, stitch their hooves into his skin. These little beasts, wiggling like polygraph needles, provide Ron with the one thing that will propel him through the door, out into the light, and that is simply the impulse to do so.
Out on the porch, out of the house, finally in some clothes and looking far more serious than anyone has for some years, Ron places one open hand behind himself against the door. The other is pushed forward, with fingers splayed like antennae. There is no way to penetrate this pose, to find what Ron is feeling. His interior life has migrated and it now convenes with the word ‘couch,’ the word ‘drape.’ He probably prefers the word ‘drape,’ so he can rest his head on the high stem of the ‘d’ as he stretches his body along the comfortable curves, the back of his right knee breaking leisurely over the stump of the ‘p.’ That this part of the couch spells rape is either the unfortunate appearance of the furniture’s structure or it’s an unnecessarily lurid little emblem of what has just happened. Either way, he stands as still and graceful as a Tai Chi master, and on his body innumerable lives hold their breaths, exchanging looks, not even daring to speak.
★
The sun shall be placed in the sky so as to prevent night, its position determined locally by the time observed. In the case of it being two o’clock the sun shall have begun to descend from its zenith a reasonable portion of its seasonal trajectory. As in the present case, where the data required to calibrate accurately this position is unavailable and the consequences of inaccur
acy are negligible, the sun can be moved manually, using soft adjusting taps with the back of the fingers or top of the thumb. The sun should not ever be removed from the sky, and no stars shall be allowed to appear; however, the moon may appear faintly. If stars do appear, check sky for darkness uncharacteristic of daylight hours and adjust accordingly. The stars should vanish instantaneously. As sunlight drives into the lawn, be certain that it has the property of waves or no colour will appear. If the lawns are not yet green allow them to become so and be sure that the thin, dry layer of vegetation beneath the blades of grass is no more than five days dead. In order to determine if the light is in fact behaving with wave properties, pay particular attention to the fourth yard from the southern corner. If the child in the wading pool in this yard is not adjusting the blue nozzle of a hose, your sunlight may be behaving too like bullets or pulses.
It is unnecessary to distinguish any of these yards further than manipulating the rectangular shapes they repeat. A window or door will suffice as a template. Simply remove the door, enlarge it while rotating it ninety degrees towards you, and lay it in the appropriate space for a lawn, and so on. The door will also assist in the construction of the houses, twelve in all. Feel free to use your aesthetic sense of spacing when laying out lampposts etc. You should be pleasantly surprised at how agreeable the utility of the objects is to your aesthetic decisions. If this is not your experience remove the sun immediately in order to dampen any potential discord among the incompatible functions you will undoubtedly have begun to produce. Never underestimate this type of irritability, and do not attempt to reconstitute objects which will have already begun to engineer their own sulky lives, quite resistant to interference. If everything does begin to exhibit familiar attributes — for instance, the shadow of the mailbox should fall in the same direction and conform to the same relative lengthening as the aerial on the blue car, allowing for topographical specificities — if everything presents itself as serviceably familiar, then particular attention can now be given to the aforementioned house with the blue car in its driveway.
