by Jordan Krall
Eurice and her nephew Lucasse were right there beside him, laughing and tearing up a book that had been at the feet of the bloodied man. Franco saw the words in the book as they danced incoherently across the pulpy pages. They formed no real language, no real communication.
Franco then knew all communication was false and incoherent at the very root of the world. He wondered: is this what loop panic feels like? Are imperium waves disrupting my thought patterns?
Did Eurice order any magazines subscriptions?
What now?
Too many questions.
Franco pulled on the wrist of his right hand, digging his nails into the skin to take off the black glove which he no longer wore.
Soon the skin dropped to the floor like ancient wallpaper revealing a gold, mechanical hand. The fingers curled into circles, glistening in the light coming through the smudged windows of the kitchen. Eyes stared up at him through each circle: yellow irises around red pupils.
Blinking, blinking, blinking.
Franco extended his metallic fingers and heard his false knuckles crack loudly, echoing through the house like an organic doorbell. The thirst beckoned him again and his mouth turned to sour cotton.
Franco picked up the milk carton and put it to his nose, inhaling the sharp alcohol smell mixed with milk. He brought it to his lips and swallowed more of the liquid as he thought about the dead man in the park and why he had helped annihilate him.
Why, indeed.
The eyes on the floor combined to make one giant, pulsating mass of color. It stared at Franco like the eye of a silent father figure. There was disapproval, yes, but also a sort of love. But hadn’t his father left him when he was still a baby? There was no memory of the man except in smudged Polaroids. Franco felt it through the haze of the alcoholic milk. He had disappointed his father and his father’s father but he was still of their flesh.
Several generations of arcane disapproval and buried anxiety climaxing in one moment of Franco’s life: in his standing in the kitchen of a house he had no business being in all because he had ventured into the house in the hopes of selling magazine subscriptions and acquiring just a few more silver dollars to add to his meager savings.
Another swallow from the carton and his mind is crumpled like the page of an unwanted manuscript. His thoughts fell around him: discarded words from the page of an out-of-print book that had been translated into an unknown, superfluous language. Ideas spread out like flames throughout the kitchen.
Like an obsolete automaton, Franco used his mechanical hand to grip the milk carton and bring it to his mouth. He drank the rest of the liquid, feeling it ooze down his throat, burn through his stomach, and invade his bowels until the bottom half of Franco’s body exploded in a brief but loud exorcism of blood and finality.
Before he died, Franco was able to utter the word that was the closest thing to a curse that was ever expelled from his lips.
“Father.”
UNFRUITFUL WORKS
(AS RECORDED DURING MY SUBSEQUENT ISOLATION AND REDUNDANT BETRAYAL OF SOCIETAL OBLIGATIONS IN ACCORDANCE AND AGREEMENT WITH MYRIAD SUPERFLUOUS COMPULSIONS PROVIDED BY AN OTHERWISE OUTMODED SOURCE VIA OTHER ANALOGUE SOURCES)
I.
The view outside my window is of an apple orchard and it is rotting.
II.
I dreamt I met her for the first time and that she cut me across the throat with a piece of burnt apple core. The blood dripped like molasses in slow-motion gore against a high fashion background: her apartment in red and blue hues surrounded by people holding champagne glasses and sniffling through runny cocaine nostrils. Mario Bava directing a mod film destined for obscurity in the cobwebbed archives of my skull.
You’d think that I would have put a hand to my throat to hold in the blood like what they do in most movies but no. Instead, I grabbed the nearest glass of bubbly and splashed her face. Golden champagne soaking the almighty queen; it looked like a golden shower gone awry. She bared her teeth like a mad chimpanzee and I felt the blood go back into my neck as if someone was pulling up a violent crimson window shade.
If I lower my chin to my chest I can still smell the apple-scar.
Bava would zoom in quickly: extreme close-up on the disappointed lover’s face.
Then: a woman’s gaping mouth.
III.
From my window I see a car explode and I think it might have been a judge’s car.
IV.
When I first met her she was already a celebrity, a famous and dominant bitch of the silver screen. I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t recognize her as she downed drink after drink at the ultra-hip bar in the ultra-hip restaurant. I only happened to be there because a friend of mine told me that we’d be able to score some pills from one of the waiters. We got lucky and had to wait in line for an hour and a half only to find out that the waiter in question couldn’t finish his shift due to an overdose. He left in an ambulance. My friend and I cursed ourselves for having not come earlier. He left but I decided to stay. I figured if it took us that long to get in I might as well hang back and experience the life and times of people out of my league.
She was sitting at the bar wearing sunglasses, fiddling with her hair (which was shaped in a little bob haircut, very cute and very severe). I didn’t really pay much attention except to notice there was a diamond ring on her finger so huge that I thought it was one of those toy rings kids got out of those crappy machines. Put the quarter into the slot. Turn the handle. Wait for the plastic egg to be laid by Death and crack open to reveal a diamond the size of an eyeball.
I must have been staring too long because she turned to me and said, with a snotty attitude straight out of a soap opera, “Can I help you?”
There was venom in her voice but I can’t say that I hated it. I often found that women were more honest when they were pissed. Nice women made me suspicious. A woman flipping you the finger reveals all the truth you’ll ever need. A bitchy woman is a paranoid woman and a paranoid woman is an experienced one.
“Nothing, I’m sorry. I was just looking at your ring. It’s really big.” Really big. As soon as it came out of my mouth I was ready to bludgeon myself. I knew I wasn’t charming but surely I could do better than that.
“So?” Her sunglasses were big, black bug-eyes. Below them was a long, protruding nose and below that, a pair of dark, moist lips that parted, revealing small, bright (and unnaturally even) daggers of teeth. I couldn’t even imagine someone having teeth that clean. As a reflex, I ran my finger across my own and felt the filmy layer of grime on them.
“I’m sorry. I…” My face felt warm and so I grabbed my drink (bottom shelf scotch, neat) and stood up.
“Okay, I didn’t say you had to leave. Just sit down.” She bent her head and her eyes peeked over the sunglasses. If my life was a movie, this would be the part where she smiles and reveals that her prior attitude had been just a defense mechanism or a test to see if I wanted her badly enough.
But, you see, this wasn’t a movie.
Her face couldn’t have had less of a smile. In fact, I believe she looked even more pissed. So I sat back down and swallowed the rest of my scotch in one burning gulp that made my throat constrict.
For the next hour I sat and listened to her complain about everything under the sun. Her agent. Her co-stars. The director. The producer. Her mother. Her ex-boyfriend. Her ex-fiancé. Her dog. Her landlord. The whole thing was so vivid and absurd that it came out sounding like a Hollywood version of the Canterbury Tales. That is if Chaucer wrote his stories while drinking glass after glass of obscenely expensive champagne.
By midnight I was pretty drunk having consumed about two hundred dollars worth of scotch. That may seem like a fatal amount of alcohol but considering the prices of each glass, you’d be surprised. When the muscular but feminine bartender slipped my bill into the empty glass in front of me, I picked it up slowly, trying to let my partner for the evening see the amount as if that would impress her. I didn’t h
ave that much cash on me (only about $40 which was originally allotted for the pills) but I had a credit card (for emergencies only! I’ve always told myself) that I took out of my well-worn faux-leather wallet.
“Put it away,” she said to me and then motioned to the bartender. “Put his drinks on my tab.” There was no “please”. It wasn’t a request. It was a command and the bartender followed that command as if the consequence for disobedience was death.
I said, “Uh, thanks, but you don’t have to do that.” I stumbled over my words, partly from being drunk but mostly because the act was unexpected and I wasn’t used to a woman buying me a drink let alone a night’s worth of unjustly expensive scotch.
“Don’t worry about it.” She didn’t say it cute. She said as if to tell me, “You think that’s a lot of money? It’s nothing. Why are you even acknowledging it? I might as well have bought you a newspaper.” Or at least that’s how I took it. I admit I could be paranoid at times.
Then she said, “You’re a good listener.” Normally this would have been a compliment but she said as if it was a bad thing, a criticism. I guess in her circle of friends, a good listener was someone who had nothing better to do. Women like her are attracted to men who acted uninterested. They want men with lives full of excitement and business deals. They want the go-getters, the ex-frat boys, the jocks. Those women never went for the nice guys, the sensitive guys, the guys who read books and never make eye contact.
Regardless of her attitude toward my listening skills, she asked for my number and I wrote it with a leaky blue ballpoint pen on the back of a moist coaster. Without looking at it, she put it into her purse, leaned over, and gave me a quick, casual kiss on the cheek. I felt the blood rush simultaneously to my face and dick; both blushed with excited embarrassment.
That night I went home to my apartment, horny but not insulted. Her bitchiness didn’t offend me, didn’t hurt my ego.
She was what she was and there was nothing I could say that would place any blame on her. Her stardom didn’t intimidate me but her personality did. I wanted more from her despite the fact that I knew that movie stars don’t date men like me: poor men who have boring, meaningless jobs. I started to convince myself that the whole night was one big joke on me. The universe took it upon itself to show me what an awkward fool I was. No woman like that would be interested in me, right? Well.
She called the very next day.
V.
Lightning had struck a tree outside my window and it is still blackened even after I painted it to improve my view.
VI.
I wasn’t home when she called and so she had left a message on my machine. It was a short, bitchy message that included many social-sexual codes but no call-back number. She’d call me back, she said. So that call was like one elusive whiff of perfume, one slight kiss on the neck. Here I am, it said, and here I go.
I called out sick from work the rest of the week because I didn’t want to miss her call. There goes all my sick days, I thought. But I had to do it. I couldn’t miss her again. I’d never forgive myself.
She called again.
My romantic expectations are always low so when she asked to meet me, I assumed it was obviously for some other reason besides sex or love. We met again on a Friday night at a real dive of a place. Millie’s, I think it was called. I don’t remember. The place ended up being blown up a few weeks later. I’d like to believe that her dominant, overpowering beauty destroyed that restaurant. Her personality was too much for it and it sunk into whatever despair that buildings and businesses experience. She was psychological Semtex.
Or maybe she used her political connections to have it torn down. I thought about that. Maybe our going there was a catalyst for her hatred for the building, for the restaurant that had been there for over sixty years. She had wanted it destroyed so she told her father and he made some calls, signed some papers, and the place was set for demolition. That was surely a possibility. Under the right circumstances, anything was possible.
Though she had a typical celebrity figure, she ate like a starving child, her lips and fingers covered with barbeque sauce and her chin dripping with meat juice. There was a copious amount of corn muffins next to her plate. They sat there serenely like golden breasts. From across the table I could smell the corn, the buttery fluff and grit of the maize god; I wanted to dig my teeth into the breasts and grind the grit with my teeth and explore it with my tongue. I think she noticed my preoccupation and so she grabbed the largest muffin and with two bites, annihilated it. Crumbs fell down into her freckled cleavage. I could feel my feet doing a little dance under the table. I wanted to be those golden breasts. I wanted to be annihilated by her mouth and dissolved by her saliva and her digestive juices.
I wanted to be famous….but in an obscure way.
VII.
A crack in my window disturbs the view of the cars speeding through the farm to look for the judge’s bones.
VIII.
After dinner she spat into a napkin and said, “You have something on your face.” She rubbed the sloppy cloth across my upper lip, poking her finger into my mouth and letting her drool slip in as well. “There. All clean.”
I sort of felt like I should spit out her saliva but didn’t. Instead I just sucked it into my throat and swallowed. I felt the corn muffin grit and tasted the inside of her mouth: smoky teeth and expensive fillings.
Corn muffins have always been one of my favorite foods and over a recent period of just a few years, I had become an expert on which brands of corn muffins were worth eating and which ones were simply bland, gritty corn-flavored cupcakes. When I didn’t feel like going to the store to buy some, I would make my own from the stockpile of corn muffin mix I kept in my bedroom. Sometimes I wouldn’t even cook the batter; I’d just eat it with a spoon like it was thick soup.
The corn muffin from her mouth tasted like a generic brand from the local supermarket. I guess the restaurant was trying to cut corners. That’s not a bad thing, really. Many of the “gourmet” brands taste so unlike corn muffins I am shocked they could even be advertised as such. So in this situation, I was pleasantly surprised.
“Want dessert?” she said, licking her fingers sloppily, drool hanging like glistening vines. “I can go for a brownie sundae. You?”
I didn’t really want anything else to eat but I also didn’t want to disappoint her or give her any reason to reject me. So I said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Want to share one?”
“Sure.”
She grabbed the dessert menu, looked at the picture of the brownie sundae, and then up at the ceiling. “You know, I think I’m going to get my own.”
“Oh, okay, that’s fine.”
The waiter then walked over as if by magic. He looked at her menu, saw her finger tap the picture twice and he walked away.
She said, “Do you read?”
“Uh, a little bit, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I, uh, don’t read much anymore, you know. I mean, I don’t really have the time anymore.”
Her eyebrows perked up. “Oh? Busy, are you?”
“Well, I mean, yeah, I guess. You know, with working and shit like that.”
“Don’t you get a lunch break?”
“Yeah but…”
She leaned forward, opening her mouth ever so slightly and blowing her sweet, corn-bread breath into my face along with tiny sprinkles of spit. She said, “You know you could eat and read at the same time. Eat your little sandwich with one hand while holding up a book with the other, right?”
Where was she going with this? I didn’t know. She actually didn’t strike me as the type of person to read but there she was giving me tips on how to be more literate.
I said, “I guess I just never found that many books I wanted to read.”
“Maybe you’re not looking in the right place.”
I decided to turn the tables on her. I don’t know why, really. After being careful not to risk h
er rejecting me, I was going to take the risk of questioning her. I said, “How do you find time to read? You know, with your busy schedule. Do you have an assistant read the books and then give you a summary?”
She leaned back in her chair and before I could open my mouth to apologize, the waiter placed the desserts on the table in front of us. He had practically come out of nowhere as if waiting to put the food down to distract from the awkward silence. I mentally thanked him for that.
But then the waiter looked at the both of us and said, “How long you guys been married?”
My throat dried up. My temples pounded. My cheeks burned. What the hell was the waiter thinking? What wrath did he just unleash?
I looked at her, expecting the worst. But she looked me right in the eye while answering the waiter. “A month.”
The waiter shrugged, probably wondering why newlyweds were having such a tense dinner. I wanted to punch the guy square in the nose but knew I would never be able to do something so violent. Besides, he looked creepy and pathetic as it was. A punch in the face would probably just devastate him.
Once the creep walked away, I said, “What the hell was that about?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Were you offended?”
“Not really.”
“I saw your face when he asked us. You were petrified. Were you afraid I was going to flip out? Were you afraid I was going to scoff as his implication? Or that I was going to be embarrassed to someone believe we were a couple? Admit you were scared.”
