Then, a bird collected on the windowsill. The rain continued to fall against the glass. He held a watch in his hand, but he wasn’t looking at it—the timepiece was just a thing on his list that needed fixing. Instead, he watched the bird. “Bird,” he called out to no one, not expecting any response. “Hey bird. Where would you and I be if the world were a mountain of paper?” he said.
He thought about paper a lot. It was another thing of the past, a currency that had all but lost its value. In his mind, the world outside the windows of the store was the opposite of a mountain of paper. It was everything besides paper, in fact. The bird stretched its neck, and by default, its tiny head, in a motion the storeowner briefly considered obscene. And then it flew away.
One day a teenage boy came into the shop. It had been so long since the old man had a customer, that the sound of the bells just inside the door startled him. “There’s no browsing in here,” he told the boy, without so much as a hello. “Just buying, or leaving.”
“I’m not here to browse,” he responded. “No time for that.” He shuffled a few more steps inside until he was standing near the cash register, where the man stood with the watch still in his hand. “I hear you keep a magic high school in here, and it brings you good luck, or something.”
“Where’d you hear that, son?” The old man’s voice was shaking—either he was out of practice, having spoken to no one in weeks, or else he had just signaled to the boy that yes, there was in fact a magic high school somewhere in the store, collecting dust like the rest of the junk. “No high school in here, anyway,” he added, first glancing around the shelves and aisles, and then looking down at the watch while picking up a small screwdriver from on top of the counter.
“How’s your security system then?” the boy asked with a weird confidence that made him seem much older. “You feel pretty good about all your stuff stayin’ exactly where it is?”
The old man was nervous, despite the vast amount of years separating the two. “I think you had better go, young man. And don’t come back again any time soon, either.”
The boy turned and walked out of the store without saying another word. To the old man, he seemed neither concerned, nor hurried. Just like that, he was gone, and the old man was alone again with all of his dusty treasures. He locked the front door when the boy was out of sight, and went back to his office to make sure the magic high school was still sitting where he always kept it.
By the end of the week, another six strangers had wandered into the store, asking the old man questions that left him feeling uncomfortable and scared. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt fear. Every one of them had asked about the magic high school, and none of them had bought anything, or even bothered to look.
Could a person live in a world without relation to anyone else? he thought to himself. At some point long ago, the answer had seemed obvious to him, so he bought the small town’s junk shop after the original owner had died, and did little to improve upon its original condition. Instead, he had piled up whatever came his way until it introduced itself to the ceiling in one corner or another.
A dozen years passed. Every day he went to work in the store, sifting through piles, not counting or writing anything down—just looking at it all in a gentle, passive manner. Until one day, when he discovered the magic high school.
Few things were colorful in the space around him. Most of it was brown, or an offshoot of brown, objects that had begun their slow descent back to dirt. It made more sense, in a way that felt biblical to him. Dust to dust, he had thought to himself a handful of times.
On a shelf somewhere amid the rubble, there was a cake stand, high up but not hidden. Though the rounded glass dome of the lid had collected its share of dust, the old man could still see inside through the clear walls. The architecture of the miniature white model inside was obvious—there were trees, and a football field, a grand front entrance like any other high school.
It wasn’t a hospital, or a government building, or an office park, or a library. It was a high school, with all the required parts, from the long brick rows of miniature classrooms, to the tiny rolling hills, and even a swimming pool that shuddered against the tip of his finger when he leaned in to touch its thimble-full of water. When the almost inaudible school bell rang, throngs of children appeared from out of nowhere, and rushed inside the buildings to begin their day.
The old man did not know what to make of the little world living beneath the glass dome. What secrets did it hold? Had it always been there? Who would have sold such a thing to a junk shop in a small, forgotten town? He replaced the lid on the cake stand, carefully sealing the high school back inside, and brought the whole thing into the office behind the register.
There, he kept watch over it for many, many years.
Every morning since the day when he had discovered the cake stand and its tiny magic world, the old man could hardly wait to get back to work in the junk shop. He would rise in the morning full of life, hurry through a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and walk the few blocks that separated his home from the shop, where he would lock the door behind him.
In the office, he sat down in front of the desk on which he kept the cake stand. The old man lifted the brown blanket that he laid over it every night before he left the shop, as if the cake stand were a birdcage, and it was his solemn duty to ensure nighttime fell over the high school at the appropriate hour.
Within a week, he had learned all that he would ever know about Edun High. With the help of a high-powered hearing aid, he could pick up the announcements as they rang out over the school’s public address system. During recess, or lunch, and sometimes after school, he listened in on the students’ dull chatter. With a magnifying glass intended for repairing watches, he figured out the roles that everyone played: who was the most popular, who was the smartest, who was in trouble, and who was aching to graduate and move out of the tiny town. He knew when the pep rallies were happening, who threw the best parties, and who had gotten into fights.
In a month, the world of Edun High had become his own.
When a year had passed, and the old man was expecting to sit in on his first graduation, it became clear that none of the students enrolled at Edun High School ever left. After that first year, things began to change.
In the store, the phone would ring, but the old man never answered. The only bell he responded to came from within the high school. When he realized that the world beneath the glass dome existed in its own kind of perpetuity, a thing that lived outside of time, the old man began sleeping inside the store every night. He stopped eating, and slept for only a few hours each night, on a dusty couch in the office.
Years passed, and the old man seemed to stay the same—not getting any younger, but not getting any older, either. He was always just . . . an old man. Though he hadn’t gotten any smaller, and certainly not small enough to climb underneath the domed lid of the cake stand, or to walk up the tiny stairs and into the main school entrance at Edun High, the rules that governed that world had become his, too. The old man was no longer aging.
And just like that, a hundred years passed.
Things eventually returned to a more normal state around the junk shop. The old man answered the occasional phone call, and said hello to the occasional man or woman who came in. He still slept in the office on the old couch, and when he wasn’t running things, he was sitting in his chair, staring through the magnifying glass at whatever happened to be going on at the magic high school.
He was mostly left alone—until the teenage boy and the other half-dozen strangers had come into the store, all of them asking about the high school. And the old man found himself beginning to worry about his treasure, and its safety.
The phone rang. The telephone’s voice was an antique scrawling that hardly commanded him to action, but he answered it anyway. A woman had found the store’s telephone number in an ancient phone book, or at least that’s what she said.
“Hello?�
�� the old man muttered, without having to think about it first.
“You’re open?” the voice betrayed only the slightest bit of anticipation. Or maybe it was fear. Whatever the case, he sensed it, and felt something retreating inside. “Is the store open today?” the woman asked again after some time.
“Yes. I don’t want anything. Who’s this? What do you want?” He hadn’t intended it to sound so abrupt, but the recent rash of visitors to the store had made him paranoid. Conversation now came out of him like noises from an old machine, in desperate need of lubricant. “I’m sorry,” he added. “Yes. We are open.”
A week had passed since the old man had gotten the phone call, and no one else had called the shop since. Now, it was ringing again. After a few rings, he answered it without saying a word, and waited.
“Hello, it’s me. It’s Anne. Do you remember?” a woman said softly, as if she knew him.
“What do you want? I thought you were gone. Somewhere. I don’t know where. I never did.” The old man did not know where the words had come from. It was as if he had known this woman in another life—as if another tiny iteration inside of him was responding to her questions, and understanding where they were coming from, or who was asking them.
“I’m here. I’m coming to see you. I know the store—I’m close to it now. I thought you should know.” There was something final in her voice, a confidence that did not put him at ease.
The old man hung up the phone.
Now, he was scared.
No one came into the store that week, and its place in the world continued to seem arbitrary. The old man thought of the store as a kind of secret that everyone besides him had forgotten.
Sitting in front of the desk in his office, the old man was scratching some lines on a small white piece of paper, not thinking of what they might add up to. The drawing came out of him like a drip from a faucet, with no one there to explain it away.
And then the bells on the front door jangled, and he emerged from his office to see who was inside the store, and if it was the woman who had called.
She was standing there in front of him, on the other side of the counter, much like the teenage boy had been several weeks earlier.
The woman held out her hand, but the old man did not shake it.
“That was you on the phone the other day, I take it?” the old man said as the woman returned her hand to her side. Just then, he noticed a large freckle on her face, near the curve of her jawline. He thought it looked like a burnt piece of toast.
“Harold?” she said softly. “It’s me, Harold. Is that you?”
He was holding a sliver of torn paper in his left hand. A pencil rested behind his ear and he could not remember the last time he had taken a bath, though he did not believe that he smelled. Is my name Harold? the old man thought. But the name didn’t resonate with him, no matter how hard he tried to make it sound like something familiar. Harold, it seemed, was not the old man’s name.
“What is it?” she asked. She looked up at him as if she were asking for more than just an explanation, as if she knew the answer to all of his questions about the nature of loneliness, of being alone in the world.
But the old man did not answer her. He stood there staring into her face, like he was trying to read an old map describing a place or a time that had existed long ago, in a past that he had little access to. Wherever she had come from, and whoever she was supposed to be, was a world beyond his experience—beyond his imagination.
The woman was not looking at the old man, who was looking at her. Instead, she looked around the junk shop, moving her head in half-circles, letting her gaze fall on every little detail the shop contained. “Do you sleep here?” she asked.
Again, the old man didn’t answer.
“What’s back there?” she asked, pointing behind the old man, through the door to the office where he kept the magic high school.
“I—I—I have to use the bathroom. You’ve come at a bad time,” the old man said, thinking it would be enough to convince the woman it was time to leave. And he turned to walk towards the other end of the junk shop, in a corner opposite the office where the tiny bathroom was, as far away from the woman as he could possibly get.
He closed the door behind him, and started to wash his hands. He did not have to use the bathroom, but the urge to cleanse himself of the experience with the woman was strong, though he did not know why. He washed his hands, and then washed them a second time, and then again after that. Each time, he scrubbed them vigorously with the brown bar of soap, rinsed the bubbles from his fingers, and dried them off.
After the fifth time, while the old man dried off his hands, he thought he could hear the sound of the jangling bells, signaling that the woman had finally left the shop.
But something was different.
The old man’s hands were hidden beneath the towel, as he dried the last bit of water from them. He was scared to remove it, scared of what his hands might look like. So he stood there and waited like that, with his hands covered, until he was convinced enough by a shaky confidence that his hands would look the same as they always did.
But when the old man removed the towel, his hands did not look the same. Instead, they were more wrinkled than before, mottled with dozens of overlapping spots in various brown tones. In a word, his hands looked older.
The old man hurried out of the bathroom, through the aisles of the junk shop, and headed toward the office behind the front counter.
Suddenly, he stopped.
The woman was gone from the shop, and the old man knew exactly what he was going to find once he got inside the office.
UMBILICUS REX
CHRIS KELSO
ACT ONE
The curtains part to reveal a flaming stage. Two silhouettes are visible between the iron bars of a prison cell. The clunking of pistons and oil drills and lawnmowers scream all over the somber scene from somewhere out of shot. A huge digital clock flashes above with ONE HOUR in red cyphers.
Motes of light start to illuminate the men beneath the shadows—a new-born, two hours old, drags a tiny comb through his thin wispy hair. He is iridescent in the low light, a swathe of amniotic fluid covering the crown of his soft, swollen scalp. Outside the prison gate, two guards wearing quarantine jumpsuits wave drivers through. The smog outside possesses a supernatural quality in the shade of night.
Pan to opposite cell.
Disfigured globes of molten glass emerge from the chugging heart of a furnace in the neighboring cell. Two workers slap on industrial gloves and stoop into a mound of dead animals. The workers begin molding the glass into beakers.
The child watches intently, side profile.
Close-up on one worker stabbing his wrench into one of the mangled corpses (which may have once been a deer or a stag) and tears it open like a busted piñata. He removes each organ with a surgeon’s grace and throws them into a steaming pile. The strained remains fill each beaker with droplets until full.
The machinery is deafening, a medley of hydraulic rams and pumping apparatus, bone grinders and overhead cranes. The stink of metal, of the animal carcasses and grease trapped under the belt add to the hellish image in the prison.
Image of animal corpses.
People rarely eat the flesh of grazing animals or fish from the sea anymore. The real market is in vital organ manufacturing. There is no evidence that these products help build immunity to the airborne virus tearing through the city.
The worker wipes the sweat and viscera from his forehead and looks down at his overalls. He’s never seen so much blood, even in his two decades as a corpse handler. The mass of butchered life before him has never struck the man on a compassionate level before . . . until now.
The other worker continues to mold glass beakers with dead efficiency. He lowers his polycarbonate visor and begins preparing the glass for sintering. The kid turns away and winces but he can still hear the awful noises of the gutting process.
A cowboy sits on
the bunk opposite and starts knotting up a noose. He has dark rings around his eyes and his face is wrinkled and agonized like a dustbowl farmer’s. The industrial machinery ceases its din. The cowboy and child exchange emotionless glances.
From the aperture, we see a sulphuric monsoon is developing over the city.
The cowboy tips the bill of his hat and reads from a safety pamphlet.
– The virus has torn through this city. A new feeling will wash over the victim like a film of hot glue—a powerful, overwhelming surge that leaves the body paralyzed. Victims seem to clutch at the chest region—the heart, seemingly a fragile source of constant agony.
The cowboy gives a maniacal laugh that bursts forth from the parting of his thick fish lips. He stops, suddenly tensely serious. He reads again.
– The sufferer feels moisture well under the ducts. This is a truly devastating phenomenon. Every muscle in the body succumbs to lethargy—a disease of the soul spreading like wildfire. Finally, the infected drops flat out. Dead.
The cowboy clicks his spurs and yells – Well, SH-H-E-E-I-I-T! He offers the kid a cigarette. The pink ectomorph fumbles the little white rod between his stubby finger tips before accepting the cowboy’s offer of a light. The baby coughs out a plume of smoke and stares through the bars of his cell. The cowboy avoids looking at the long umbilical cord dangling between the kid’s legs.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 20
