Prelude to Space Rape! & Other Stories
Page 17
Wait. I hear the neighbor now.
“But I don’t know any foreign films. Seven Winds? Never heard of it.”
Who are they speaking to? There is never anyone else in the house. They live alone. They do not own a telephone.
“Was it something about footprints? There’s no park around here.”
There they are again. Who are they talking to? Don’t they know I’m trying to sleep? Maybe they do know and maybe they don’t care. That would be unkind.
“He’s talking to someone. Who could he be speaking to?”
It would probably be best if I close my curtains now. I will close my curtains and pretend to sleep on the floor. My bed might not be safe and besides, it is not that comfortable. The sheets haven’t been washed in God-knows-how-long. The blankets are made of some sort of heavy wool and they, too, have been left unwashed. My whole bedtime experience is quite uncomfortable. I could probably remedy that by washing the sheets and blanket but I always seem to forget. Is that why I cannot sleep? Are the germs (my own personal germs) stimulating the cells of my body, keeping them awake, forbidding the act of sleeping, of dreaming, simply because it is in their primitive germ-minds to do so? They should know I am not their enemy.
My floor on the other hand is quite comfortable. I don’t have a carpet. It’s just your typical hardwood but somehow it seems to adapt to the contours of my body. It could just be my imagination. It probably is. But regardless it is still a comfortable spot to rest especially after I got rid of the ants.
The ants invaded about a year ago. I might have told you about it before.
They were just regular black ants. I don’t know the species or whatever but they weren’t special in any way other than being incredibly annoying to me. I had tried plenty of store-bought ant traps but they only ended up working for a few days and then the ants would be back. Finally I discovered that talcum powder worked. I sprinkled it along the wall and on the floor and it made the ants run crazily around the floor as if in some sort of hallucinatory panic. Though I did not revel in their feverish demise, I had no choice but to deter them from ever stepping foot in my room again.
There were no doubt plenty of the things in the walls and under the floor but I never saw them after I put the talcum powder down. It was, for all intents and purposes, magical powder.
I remember when I was sprinkling the powder down my neighbor saw me through the window. Surely I looked like a lunatic pouring the powder all over my room looking like a man in the middle of a cocaine orgy. But my neighbor’s judgment of me was the least of my concerns. I probably could have waved and explained what I was doing but it just didn’t seem appropriate. My neighbor would have thought I was unstable. They would probably not believe me no matter what I said.
So I kept tons of this magical powder all over my house just in the event of another invasion. I suppose it makes me sound strange keeping all that powder nearby just in case of some ants but I like to be prepared.
Hence the cassette player by my bed.
Though I haven’t had a real dream in fifteen years, I’ve had my share of false dreams. They come to me without notice and so I needed something easy to operate in order to archive them. Once the false dreams came on, I reach over and press the PLAY and RECORD buttons at the same time. The built-in microphone captured it all.
Wait, my neighbor is talking again. But with whom?
“The moon is tight. Is he talking to a machine?”
I have several dozen cassette tapes strewn around my room, in my hall closet, and on the kitchen table. I listen to them when I’m not working and that is most of the time. Some of things on those cassettes, well, some of them I just don’t remember recording to begin with. Sometimes I think that perhaps I do sleep and dream. Maybe those are recordings of my sleep-talking. But that really can’t be it because I have memories of sitting near the recorder and talking. I just don’t have any memory of what I had talked about.
There’s my neighbor again.
“Yes, insects…..some archives, still talking.”
I crawl along the floor and place the tape recorder on the windowsill. I press PLAY and RECORD. It is as much for my neighbor as it is for me.
“Do we have any milk? Alcohol?”
* * *
At breakfast, I play the cassette. As I eat my pancakes, I listen to my neighbor’s nocturnal soliloquy.
“The wallpaper in his house curls up whenever I look at it. It’s as if my mind controls it. It’s very bizarre. He’s always staring over here and I wonder if he’s checking to see if my wallpaper does the same. No, it doesn’t. But why must he stare? Ever since his mother died, he’s been creeping around. Yes, part of me feels sorry for him but…he’s just making these meetings more awkward. There must be something in the night table drawer that will….”
Then there is static. I don’t know where the static came from but when it leaves, I hear my neighbor’s voice again but this time it is quieter, more conspiratorial.
“Something like sleep, yes. Oh, the cold is still there of course. We’ll capture it in due time. Just a few more things we need. It’s all in the book.”
And that’s when my false dream kicks in. I start babbling about the weather and about the insects and about how they might come back as monstrous creatures, mutated by the talcum powder, ready to crush me beneath their feet. I also mention something about my childhood, about my cat Humphrey dying, about how my mother warning me about sex and how when you have intercourse with one person you are having intercourse with every person they have ever had intercourse with. The false dreams become more bizarre: I must have gotten really close to the tape recorder’s microphone as I start to describe a giraffe on a bicycle and a man dressed as an Indian chief who has a cantaloupe in his mouth. The cantaloupe expands into a planet and the planet turns out to be a germ on my unwashed bed. It envelopes me and sucks the health out of my body.
Then my neighbor’s voice again.
“Turn the tape recorder off. Turn it off!”
I nearly choke on my pancakes.
I turn the tape recorder off and throw it down the basement steps.
* * *
Now I sleep in my mother’s old room.
The bedding is clean (for now) and the wallpaper is neither distracting nor boring. In addition to the change in rooms, I do not record my false dreams anymore. The cassette player is in many pieces at the bottom of the basement stairs. Occasionally I open the door and look down at it. I believe the small mechanical destruction should be left there like sacred runes.
So now my bedtime ritual is this: I get a warm blanket and snuggle in bed with a pillow. The patches of cold are in this room as well. That’s one thing I can’t escape. Then I put on a foreign film on the television and I keep a watchful eye out for invading ants. It is not the most comforting ritual but it has gotten me through a few nights during which I believe I might have slept two or three minutes. While trying to fall asleep, I can also smell my mother’s perfume: Seven Winds.
The films I watch do a lot to distract me from the disturbing static I had heard from the tape recorder as well as the fact that I no longer have the machine to explore my archives. I find that the static still clings to my mind more than any other sound. It’s like snow made of glue lingering around my head, attempting to block my thoughts.
Still, I concentrate on being warm and following the butchered subtitles of the foreign film. They are talking about a woman being sick with fever and a gong is being struck. Someone is running through the snow.
From the new room I can occasionally hear my neighbor but the voice is very faint this time.
“New room now. The cold is going to take him now….just like his mother.”
BLACK POLAROIDS
Through the screen door,
Mother shouted something
Her face obscured by wire
Guilt and nostalgia
Spoken through the warm air
Landing on the grass
That needed to be mowed
Not hearing her anymore
I’m checking the attic for keepsakes
Behind a box of yellow comics
And action figure parts
There is a stack of photographs
Held by a rubber band
That sticks to my fingers
Flipping through years
Of dust covered bad choices
Ropes, latex, pentagrams
It was the 1970s after all
Freedom to be sleazy
Before you were parents
Before things were normal
I carry the pictures to the backyard
Throw them onto the lawn
You want the lawn mowed
I’ll mow it
The photographs as fodder for the blades
Let the wind carry your secrets
Into the neighbor’s yard
I keep one corner of one picture
I’ll tape it to the wall above my desk
There’s a face I recognize
Scratched through years of whisky
And lawn mower blades
I used to call him uncle
Should I have called him dad?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordan Krall is the author of Piecemeal June, Squid Pulp Blues, Fistful of Feet, Beyond the Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys and Blow Up the Outside World (with Ash Lomen). He lives in New Jersey. Visit him at http://jordankrall.wordpress.com/
Table of Contents
Prelude to Space Rape!
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
Stories
THE DUNCH HORROR
HOWLING BEARD
FUNTIME, USA
BILLY ROANOKE
BRADLEY SANDS IS A DICK
HEY ANDY
SO ANDY
SICK ROOM NEEDS
SANTA CLAUS AND THE ELVES OF FUCK
AND YOU SHOULD BELIEVE IN SOLAR LODGES
THE PISTOL BURPS
Unfruitful Works
& Other Personal Horrors
THE FATHER TRILOGY
A REPTANT HELL
NEON GUTTER MEAT
HIS CANDESCENCE
HAIL DESIRE AND BODIES OF COLD GENTLEMEN
BLACK POLAROIDS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR