Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “My jacket does not want to cooperate. It cannot hold its liquor as well as I, no? There we go,” Eve says, as she finally frees herself.

  Reidier watches his wife without expression.

  Eve scrunches her nose at his agendaless gaze. The look that once hypnotized her now fills her with a quiet rage. “‘After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world,’” Eve says.

  She looks at a photograph hanging on the wall. It’s a picture of Eve and Otto playing in the snow in Chicago. Eve kneels next to her son who stands up to his waist in a drift. He’s decked out in a blue, puffy down jumper. Both Eve and Otto are trying to catch snowflakes on their extended tongues. Otto’s eyes look up into the sky. Eve glances sideways at Otto. Her eyes are smiling. “Oscar Wilde said that.”

  “I’m sure he was an expert on such an intoxicating subject. Have you been reading him?”

  Eve shakes her head. “No. Spencer taught me that quote. He’s committed quite a lot of quotes and lines to memory.”

  Eve waits. Again Reidier doesn’t rise to the bait.

  “He showed me this great Algerian bar down on the river right by the hurricane gates. His French is fantastic. They have a crystal absinthe apparatus, is that how you say it in English? Oui, tout comme latin. You would love it.”

  “I’m sure. You two will have to take me next time.”

  “Next time you’re working late in your lair on your secret island?” Eve laughs to herself. “It’s like one of z’ose James Bond films. Gold Island. It’s too fantastic to be true, no?”

  “Gould.”

  “Quoi?”

  “Gould Island. Not Gold.”

  Eve waves her hand at him as if to say don’t bother me with such trifles as mispronunciations from my accent or homonyms. “It’s still a secret lair on your island. But yes, the next time you are working late z’ere, Spencer and I will be sure to take you along.”

  Reidier finishes his milk, stands up, walks the length of the table toward Eve, and past her. He stops in the hall. “If you need a nightcap, I think there’s a bottle of Pernod in the cabinet. I think we’re out of pewter absinthe spoons, but a fork’ll do the trick for holding the sugar cube.”

  Reidier starts to head up the stairs.

  “No matter how hard you try to remain objectively removed from our life, you are in it. Up to your ass. You are affecting it. You are affected by it. Even a statue still gets shit on,” Eve shouts after him.

  Reidier stops on the stairs. His hand rests on the railing. He stares at the grain of the wood on the step above the one he’s standing on. Reidier takes in a sharp breath as if he just remembered to breathe and says, “I am not a statue. I love you. You’re drunk. And you’re not seeing things clearly right now.”

  “Ah. Well, you are sober and also not seeing things either. So presumably we can now conclude that alcohol has no bearing on our current misperceptions of reality.”

  Eve still faces the end of the table where Reidier had been sitting. She’s fixated on the object he left behind. Reidier remains standing on the second stair, staring at the third.

  “Is it more comfortable for you to pretend you are above it all? Hm? To look down at the rest of us in the muck, make your observations, draw your hypotheses. So, then, ok. Not a statue. God then. Is that what you are playing at? The omniscient onlooker. Pah! Even the most distant god affects the world by not getting his hands dirty. Objectivity is a myth.”

  Eve turns around in her chair and looks back at him.

  Reidier lifts his gaze and meets his wife’s stare. “I am not above it all. I am just not reacting to your current tantrum.”

  Eve nods. “I see. Very good. Employing the techniques of the French mère for an impudent bébé. Go then. Leave me to my tantrum and go upstairs and cast your gaze on your little creature, my nongod.”

  “I’ve asked you not to call him that,” Reidier hisses through his teeth.

  “I call them as I see them.”

  “However you feel about me, about what I’ve done—”

  “About what you are still doing . . .”

  “However you feel, it is cruel and abusive to take it out on Ecco. He’s just a boy.”

  “He is not a boy!” Eve shouts, surprising both herself and Reidier.

  Her protest ricochets out into the hall, up the stairs, and into the dark until it is finally swallowed up by the house. For a few seconds, everything is still except for the grandfather clock ticking in the living room.

  “He is not a boy,” Eve continues in hushed tone, but with just as much vitriol. “And he is not my son. He is an abomination. Il n’est pire aveugle que celui qui ne veut pas voir.”120

  Reidier shakes his head at Eve. “Qui s’accuse, s’excuse.”121

  Eve’s assault is halted by Reidier’s French retort.

  “You’ve been working on your French.”

  “Kai . . .”

  “Of course, your little putain. Her again. How could I forget? She’s teaching you French now,” Eve asks without a question mark. “I’m glad at least she can inspire you to learn my tongue.”

  “She’s not teaching—”

  The glass flew through the air before he even saw her move. Her arm was suddenly down by the leg of the chair, and a blur was unraveling and growing in the center of his field of vision. He never really saw it at all; rather he registered some movement, which disrupted his perception of how things were.

  He was standing on the stairs. She was sitting at the dining-room table. The room was still. That’s what he saw. What he knew. What he was experiencing, however, was something altogether different. Instinct kicked in as the unexpected hurtled toward him.

  It rotated in flight, drawing a spiraled tail of water behind it. The liquid could only hold on so tight, though, and it separated into deformed spheres, like stars on the edges of a spinning galaxy, unable to quite keep up yet also incapable of resisting the pull of the primum movens.

  The glass hit the wall first. As shards ricocheted back, the trailing tail of water smashed into the wall sending its own liquid shrapnel back out. Beads of water and glass blow back at him in a disorienting wave of translucent projectiles.

  Reidier put this all together only after the fact. He looks at his hand pressed against his right lapel. He had turned away, dropped down into a squat on the first step, brought his arm across his chest, and swung his left arm protectively across his chest.

  Reidier pulls back his hand. Beneath it, his pin remains fastened securely to the lapel of his sport coat.

  She threw her glass of water at me, Reidier thinks to himself, finally able to reorganize his perspective in accordance with the data his senses have compiled. She threw it. It spun in the air. It smashed into the wall. Bits and pieces of glass and water rained down on me. Why?*

  * * *

  * Really, Hilary? So you’ve got NB footage of their thoughts now? It seems like someone has taken her artistic license and gone for a little spin out of control. Makes for a nice story, I guess.

  In fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility.

  * * *

  Within fractions of a second of ordering what had happened, Reidier has replayed the conversation prior to the launch. Kai. Kai is what set it off.

  Reidier looks down again at his lapel.

  Again the world accelerates into motion at a velocity far beyond the capabilities of Reidier’s comprehension.

  There was a scraping of wood, a veering blob, a loud banging of something hard smashing against something else hard, a small though focused breeze, an arm, a pull of extreme weight that yanked him off balance, and the thump of his foot against the floor in front of the stairs.

  The weight of her is what pulls the world back into focus. She’s his anchor to the actual. He cannot help but be drawn down into the way of thi
ngs.

  Reidier looks down at Eve. Much like with the dodging of the glass, Reidier doesn’t remember snapping into action to spot and catch his tumbling wife.

  She is just as surprised as he is to find herself in his arms. She pants with exertion.

  The proximity, however, is too much. The sense of his arms beneath her, the smell of him and his tweed coat, the vision of his concerned, open expression. The proximity is too much. Her molecules sigh apart.

  As Eve weeps against his chest, Reidier pieces reality back together. She lurched up from the chair, which scraped against the floor, launched toward me completely unable to keep her balance, the chair fell over and slammed against the floor, as Eve completely misjudged distance, and tried to slap me from over a meter away, sending her further off balance. And then I caught her.

  The two squat at the bottom of the stairs, their own version of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Reidier holds Eve’s shuddering body.

  He is at a loss for what to do, how to help, knowing full well that even if he were able to conjure up the ideal comforting response, him accomplishing this would only bring into relief for her the tragic closeness of her wants silhouetted against the insurmountable gap of reality. Damned if he did, he cannot do anything except hold her.

  Suddenly Eve grabs hold of Reidier’s shoulders, her eyes fill up with terror, she turns away from him, and her torso violently convulses. Green, bile-ridden vomit surges out of her. It splatters against the floor, coating the scattered glass shards. Another spasm, another emerald eruption. Then another. The force and rapidity of the geysers make it almost impossible for Eve to catch her breath.

  Finally after several disgorgements, Eve sags in Reidier’s arms. She gulps in air, finally permitted by her thorax to breathe. She looks at her expulsions covering the floor. The abstract pattern looks like what she imagines Rothko’s attempt at a Pollock painting would be. She sighs. “Apparently, absinthe does not make the tart grow fonder.”

  It takes Reidier a second, but once he parses his wife’s pun, he erupts with laughter. The two now shudder together in an altogether different manner.*

  * * *

  * “Let me get you a lap dance,” Lorelei shouted over Chardonnay’s tits, while leaning on McMayflower’s shoulder. He and Chardonnay were negotiating into each other’s ears.

  We had been at the Foxxxy Lady for more than ninety minutes. I was several absinthes and a bunch of nine-dollar Miller Genuines in. The establishment didn’t serve pineapple juice—I asked. Lost Dreams was gyrating in her thong on stage, Searing Sadness was sliding her silicone cleavage up the face of a patron indentified as Joey by the patch on his Cox Cable work shirt, and Dead Eyes stood on one leg, adjusting the strap of her heel on the other leg, while holding on to the curtain that hung across the doorway that led back to the Fox Den.

  Strip clubs had never been my thing. Toby and I didn’t have the time or patience for them. There was no game there, only traps and transactions. Not to mention it cost an arm and leg to never get to use your hands. Why pay to get frustrated? I understood prostitutes more than strip clubs. Sure it might be soul-sucking, but at least you got your dick wet.

  “That’s all right, I’m good,” I said, and took another swig of MGD.

  “Come on,” Lorelei pushed.

  “When in Rome, man,” McMayflower “quipped” while sliding a twenty across Chardonnay’s ass.

  “Burn it down.”

  Lorelei frowned at me. Let her. Our sojourn had neither taken my mind off dead ends, nor led to any epiphanies. It had merely proved that sometimes, I can be a shitty drunk. Especially when I’m spinning out of control as a third wheel.

  My Gould Island stunt aside, Providence was not with us. It was a nice setting for a Lovecraftian story written by a pseudopsychologist who was bored with her life, looking for a way out. Beimini, Reidier, Borges. It was her way in. Psynaring a PsychoNarrative of make-believe and science fiction. That’s why she hid it in my father’s art studio. This was her art. Her novel little novel.

  I looked up from the bottom of my beer and was eye to eye with a pair of nipples.

  “This is . . . Alluria?” Lorelei asked the stripper.

  Alluria nodded, twirled a finger around one of her dangling red curls, and popped her gum. Judging from the smell, it was either Bubble Yum or Hubba Bubba.

  “Great stage name. So much better than Cinnamon or Candy,” Lorelei complimented Alluria.

  “Thanks. I made it up myself.”

  “Alluria here has agreed to help end your shitty week on a high note.” Lorelei smiled, raised her eyebrows suggestively, then winked, and went off with McMayflower and Chardonnay back into the Fox Den.

  “You just sit back, baby, and let Alluria take your mind off things,” Alluria said. She pushed me back into the couch.

  Overpriced absinthe and nine-dollar Miller Genuines didn’t leave me much strength for protest. A remix of the Pixies’s “Where Is My Mind” began to play over the sound system.

  Alluria slowly straddled me and lowered herself down onto my lap. For such a waifish girl, the pressure of her body against mine was surprisingly solid. Her muscles flexed and gripped with a determined, though detached pressure. They had the knowledge of classical training.

  Her skin felt like velvet-covered plastic. Not quite artificial to the touch, but perversely soft and smooth, like it had been recently moisturized but somehow wasn’t greasy. Like she had gotten a Teflon spray tan, an imperceptible translucent armor sheen that would resist the residue of the world, force it to ball up on the surface, and slide off without a trace.

  Whenever her sublime pelt brushed against some exposed area of my own husk, my consciousness would focus on that patch of arm, side of the cheek, tip of the nose, but my will would focus with the precision of a meditating Buddhist monk’s, trying desperately to buck the laws of physics and transform the epidermal area in question into flypaper, turn sticky, and hold onto the tactile ecstasy.

  Eyes closed, engulfed in her ethereal embrace, her pert, perfectly shaped breasts grazed my eyelids, a nipple tracing the line of my cheekbone toward my opened lips. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the aroma of strawberries, so saccharine it felt like I was snorting pulverized Jolly Ranchers, inhaling candy dust shards right up into the folds of my cerebellum.

  Who knew the artifice of the artificial could be so intoxicating?

  But I turned away from the sharpness, unable to tolerate the intensity of unfiltered verisimilitude.

  Sensing my retreat, Alluria unfurled her torso away from me, pulling back to give a better view of her rack, her arms still dangling on my shoulders, while driving her pelvis harder against mine. She rocked her weight back through her ass and forward through her pubic bone along the length of my crotch.

  I finally dared to open my eyes and look directly at the Sun goddess.

  Alluria flashed a practiced smile and gazed through my eyes with the thousand-yard stare strippers share with war vets. A quick flick of her head, and I was submerged in a wave of red curls.

  I’m not sure whether it was the cheap strobe lights, the fog banks of absinthe, or the overload of my neural receptors with exquisite stimuli, but the experience fractured into flashes of images and sensations: a bead of sweat dripping down the nape of Alluria’s neck, a brief bouquet of sour apple, beams of colored lights fractalized through a current of sanguine curls, a tongue tip sliding along the helix of my ear, brush of the nipples, undulating pressure coaxing my erection up bolstered by veins of Adamantium, the sphere of perspiration sliding down the inside curve of a breast, the outline of abs winking in and out of existence with every gyration of hips in a figure-eight pattern tracing out the infinity symbol, thumbs hooked beneath the bikini strings, the inviting line between the hip and torso, shocking shimmers of a bare peach, inks of panoramas—

  I only sort of felt the slap. I didn’t so much feel it as realize the picture shook, like someone had bumped the television. The screen shook again.

&nbs
p; Still reality hadn’t registered.

  Not until calloused hands that felt like concrete-filled gloves grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back to the side did I finally see my arms pulling away from Alluria, did I finally feel my fingers bend back as her hips were pulled from my grasp, did I finally hear her screeching Get the fuck off me you freak-show perv!

  Lorelei materialized out of the haze, trying her best to figure out what the hell had happened, trying her best to defuse the situation, trying her best to talk the bouncer down from his Olympic wrath. McMayflower all the while cackled in the strobe-lit background.

  Instead of flashes now, everything was a loud blur of confusion, until I held my palms out like a soothsayer making an offering to the gods, toward Alluria’s scrunched down bikini bottoms.

  “It’s not panoramas, it’s Pandora’s.”

  And all eyes followed the line of my offering, to a curve of ink arched over Alluria’s bare box. A single word was tattooed: Pandora’s.

  Curious, Curzwell’s comment echoed between the base beats.

  And all I could think was $368.72!?

  I rested my hand against Alluria’s hip for balance.

  The screen shook again and went black.

  * * *

  From the floor of the guest bathroom, Eve watches her husband pass back and forth across the doorway, going from the kitchen to the front hall, carrying paper towels, a bottle of Fantastik, garbage bags, a dustpan and brush, more Fantastik, more paper towels.

  Her arm rests on the porcelain toilet seat that dates back to the early 1900s. Her other hand presses against the black-and-white tiled floor. Her fingers trace the grout around the hexagonal tile. The subway tiles on the wall feel cool against the back of her neck.

  Across from the bathroom, the dark walnut-wood door to the basement stands almost closed. The inner edge rests against the outer edge of the frame. The tongue of the latch sticks out. When Reidier’s not crossing to and fro, Eve focuses on that.

  For Reidier, Eve’s vomiting had come as a real relief. It was something he could grasp, something he knew how to handle. He knew how to help. It was a welcome distraction from his impotence with the previous circumstances. Reidier is far happier cleaning up the actual muck than getting down into Eve’s metaphorical one.