by Lori McNulty
Polymarpussle Takes a Chance
It was as if the silver poplars that ran behind my mother’s house were bent forward all fall, their brittle limbs shivering with winter dread. By the time the November chill arrived, climbed inside my bone rack refusing to leave, she had been dead two months. Then cold and numbness came to me as naturally as sleep. I missed too many work days, gave up answering the phone altogether. My roommate finally called Alicia over.
This morning she shows up with a vat of minestrone soup and hugs me at the door. She whispers something about shadowy grief and how time gets tangled up in it and then slips a folded list into my hand. Calamus root, rose quartz, plus the new Dreams of the Dolphin CD. Alicia directs me to a tiny row shop at the end of a cul-de-sac downtown and makes me promise to visit this afternoon.
The sign on the purple door reads “Open, Hours Changeable.” No one behind the counter. Good. What I came for I didn’t really know. I unfold Alicia’s list and shove it into a back pocket. What have you got for a hungry, pawing grief, I want to ask.
A musky scent drifts toward me from an Ali Baba’s cave of trinkets at the back of the store. On my haunches, I poke around the crowded carved teak racks, pull out a bronze figure with four arms, and blow the dust from its shoulders. He’s seated, bare-chested with a pitchfork in his upper left hand, a small drum clutched in the upper right. Around his neck, a snake is coiled, its thick diamond head poking out below the figure’s left ear. The sticker on the bottom reads Tryambaka Deva, Three-Eyed God. Moon in his right eye; sun in his left; third alight with fire. I stare into that wide-open third eye, feeling pure light, only energy and awe.
A knife pain begins to skewer my right lung, a roaring heat rips through my veins, tears sinew from bone, each vertebrae unfastening.
I scream.
An old shopkeeper shuffles up behind me.
“Not long now,” is all he says.
I stumble outdoors. The deserted streets are concave mirrors, sliding away from me. My body begins to pitch wildly in the dark. When my knees slam to the sidewalk, flames begin licking the back of my throat dry. I paw at my coat. My shoulders, elbows, wrists unfold like wooden yardsticks.
I look down, shocked to discover four extra limbs.
The change is transcendent. A revelation. Telling my friends proves more difficult.
Alicia R., ex-girlfriend and spoon-jewellery maker: no way! Gods have it way too rough these days. Look, I’ve got a whole book about body transmogrification in the thinning planetary atmosphere. We can abort the morph. Smudge stick, pink crystals, and a pinch of rosemary. You’ll be godless by dinner.
Harlon B., college philosopher king turned indie-record-store lounger: you don’t believe in God, so you invented one. Unseen forces? Nah. See this frosty craft brew I’m holding? That’s invisible barley proteins, gas, and sweet mystery foam, my friend. In beer, I believe. But next time, go Greek, bro, not geek. Lose the vintage threads.
Werner M., best friend and roommate, sporting rockabilly lamb chops: Polymarpussle? That’s an awesome name. Or you could call yourself Vikingman or Dragon Z, like in those post-punk Japanese cartoons. Name goes perfect with that crazy middle eye you have, and those extra gangly limbs. Chicks love the anime, dude.
The next day, I accompany Werner to the mega mall to survey my earthly dominion. With my extra limbs cloaked inside a large grey trench coat, I tuck a blue bandana under my ball cap to conceal my too-prominent third eye.
In the parking lot, we watch a woman torpedo her cart through sliding doors and load a nine hundred pack of toilet paper plus twelve identical pairs of sneakers into her car. When she backs out, two drivers screech to a halt, emerge from their cars bearing a squeegee and an ice scraper to fight over the recently vacated space.
“This is seriously messed up, Werner,” I say, shaking my heavy head.
He’s blue-lipped and shivering, but I’m teapot warm on this late-November afternoon.
“I’ve got to turn this planet upside down,” I shout, drawing Werner closer.
He covers his head.
I lean forward and give the globe a wobbly spin.
From my third eye, I watch tectonic plates shift and shiver. Soon, great floods gulp up vast swaths of uninhabited desert. Tides begin reversing, pulling the waves apart, as if a massive hand had scraped the seabed and stirred up the oceanic trench, turning toxic, floating garbage patches into life-saving plankton.
Watching the 24/7 live satellite global news feeds later, we witness fully formed babies crawl out from the mouths of presidents, chancellors, princes, and prime ministers. Shedding their wrinkled adult skins, the snot-clotted, slightly purplish newborns emerge, shaking baby iron fists in the air. Me, me, mawrl, oop, garp, arlah, they say. Notice me! Feed me! Serve me! Someone spanks the US president and the Dow falls twelve hundred points that day.
The cradle of humanity is rocked! And it’s nearly Werner’s Saturday afternoon naptime, when my third eye gains a laser-like, microscopic focus.
Gazing into the corner office on the seventeenth floor of a big-tower metropolis in Chicago, I watch a third-year law associate reject her obligatory “living hell” years before the founding partner. She promptly loses her job. Her husband, who owns an international chain of organic Bun ’N Run Delis, famous for mindful multigrain and pre-loved meats, tries to comfort his despondent wife by bringing her to work. While he scans the daily wheat futures, she punches out orders for double salami on their signature whole wheat Kindness Kaiser. Crumb-filled faces smile back at her from the deli, but she soon begins to dread the long lineups and leathery meats. One morning she slides out the cash drawer and, stepping onto the sidewalk, drops its entire contents into the lap of a homeless man. With a quick about-face, she walks directly into the grill of a speeding sausage delivery van. Her grieving husband abandons his business, letting his extensive wheat stockpiles fail, leading to the Great Kaiser Crisis.
Wheat harvesters, ever anxious to cash in on the global grain frenzy, overwork their fields as cries of cash for couscous and save our semolina resound across the planet. A global run on wheat leads to violent military clashes across the grain-producing subcontinent. One soldier abandons his post, sporting a “No War for Wheat” button. He becomes a media darling and motivational speaker. Wearing custom camouflage fatigues, he strides onto the stage before sold-out audiences and begins executing one-arm push-ups. “Who’s in charge, Sarge?” a stadium of devotees shout at him in unison. “We are!” his acolytes reply. Growing weary of the ravenous media attention, the man disappears, later resurfacing behind a thatched-roof tiki kiosk on a remote Polynesian island, selling penis-shaped black lava rock sculptures. (The German tourists rave about their ingenious sock holders.) Inspired combat fighters shed their battledress, trading in their jackboots to patrol the surf in flip-flops.
This leaves tiny but landlocked Liechtenstein, a principality founded by a family of gluten-free German yodelers to ascend as the last triumphant Old World superpower and active wheat producer. Before you can say “Yudl-ay-EEE-ooooo and pass the Käsknöfle,” world power relations shift, reviving border wars between the famished and full. Drought and conflict-ravaged people awaken. Rejecting civil war clashes, despots and dysentery, they rise up, and they’re super hungry. Pudgy leaders, recently having emerged from their awkward bottom-shuffling to crawl on all fours, can only bat at shiny things and hit round red buttons to make cute animal noises. When one overtired tot is struck with the business end of a shake rattle, all hell breaks loose.
“This is a total freaking disaster,” I blurt out, lowering my multiple arms in the living room.
“Lost souls are pouring through my fingers like sand,” I tell Werner, who is drifting in and out of a light slumber on the living-room couch.
When he doesn’t reply, I decide to unroll my yoga mat and stand in downward dog until my calves seize. Shaking my legs out, I strike the half-moon pose for a full week, letting the blood rush to my swooning head so long that a
fter a while, I feel a cry catch in my throat, a darkness only evil can answer. When I return upright, terror-stricken Werner is drooling all over the throw pillows, oblivious.
“Everything I touch collapses,” I say, slumping next to Werner on a battered thrift-store armchair. My six limbs drape down to the floor. I rub my tired middle eye, feeling myself slipping into a tunnel dark. The sign at the end of the road reads “No Reason.”
Werner begins licking crumbs from the inside of his spent dill pickle chip bag. “You need to eat,” he says.
He coaxes me to the kitchen table, where he lays out two plates of plump grapes, butter crackers, the last of the sliced serenity salami, and fans of smoked gouda.
“Come on, Poly, you have to keep your energy up,” he says, pushing a plate toward me.
I pop a grape that tastes like sour wine and pull my chair away.
“Come on,” Werner implores. “Legends are born of great quests. Heroes are always on the road, like Siddhartha or Buddha or Jack Kerouac. Holy grounds need walking. Jesus had decent sandals, am I right?”
I bolt upright. “Yes, I’ll walk!”
Along the darkest of pathways, along the most precarious of cliffs, I will walk. “But which direction?” I wonder.
Werner shrugs.
To the west, perhaps. Westward-ho, go west, young man! I think then slump back down on my chair. No. Maybe east. Where the sun rises, where humanity dawns, where Greek pantheons still flourish.
“What about the high Arctic?” Werner tosses out, slipping his gouda wedge inside a roll of deli meat. “Calving glaciers. Ice barrens. Cute polar bears!”
“The last frontier!” I shout. “Yes. Yes. Just me, some fur-bound locals, and the giant-tusked narwhals spewing truth from the floe-edge of existence.”
“You’ll need a space blanket,” Werner declares. “You know how much you hate the cold.”
South then? I think, seeing myself as a human lightning rod now, an Aztec god leading fallen souls away from the underworld. I will scale the great wall of disillusion until the doves of peace flutter across my path.
But first I need comfortable shoes.
Barefoot, trench-coated, I hobble into a local shoe shop for a fitting. My tired and callused right foot sports a bunion protuberance. It’s bloody embarrassing.
As I’m inspecting well-lit display shelves of wingtips and shiny black oxfords, a salesman in noisy green pleather pants approaches me.
“Those are some wretched-looking dogs, my friend,” he says, patting the vinyl chair before him. “Sit down here and I’ll fix you right up.”
I scan his nametag. Lenny D.: Comfort Seeker.
Eyeballing my tired feet, Lenny pulls out his metal measuring device to deliver a professional fitting.
“What do you do, my friend?” he asks, sliding the moveable width bar against the ball joint of my right foot.
“I’m in sales,” I reply, tapping the brim of my cap so it grazes the top of my nose, better concealing my third eye.
“And you’re a perfect size 11½ E,” he pronounces.
While Lenny is fitting me for a sturdy suede loafer, I notice his thick neck is a colourful canvas of fish-shaped tattoos.
“Why the flounder face?” I joke.
Rising to full height, Lenny smooths out his leatherette pants and inexplicably his eyes begin to well.
“Not long ago, I lost my wife,” he says, brushing away a tear. “We were happy, you know? Well, at least I thought we were. Living the dream. A successful entrepreneur, a big-firm professional.”
Lenny slumps down on the seat next to me. “She jumped in front of a delivery van.”
“My God,” I reply, resting my hand on his shoulder.
“This all happened before the Great Kaiser Crisis,” he continues, “when people ordered meals from servers instead of barking into those damn boxes.”
Lenny’s face turns pensive. “What didn’t I see? What didn’t I do?” He pauses, and his eyes search the distant boot racks for answers. “When I finally pulled myself together, I asked the ancients why they had called me here. It was a quiet Saturday evening, around sunset. I remember a crescent moon like a Russian scythe swishing through a red Commie sky.” Lenny dries his eyes with his shirt sleeve.
“On the day I was born, they answered, the constellations declared me a Piscean: selfless and strong, intuitive yet indecisive.” He turns to me, imploring. “My destiny was already written for me in the stars.” He looks down at his hands and starts picking at his cuticles. “At least, you know, I think it was, because I wavered a bit at first.” Lenny suddenly claps. “Then a Tolstoy novel, the greatest book ever written, dropped from my bookshelf, splayed open to the page in Anna Karenina where Kitty’s shoes ‘delighted her feet.’ Whammo! That’s when I knew working with feet was my future.”
Lenny slaps his knees and rises. “And so it will be with you, my friend.”
My hidden palms are tacky inside the trench, after Lenny draws me into a bear hug.
“I’ll take three pair,” I blurt.
“You’ll need suede protector in this climate. Only $7.99, friend.” Lenny pops a breath mint, whips out his can of protector from behind the cash, and mists my toes liberally.
I arrive home with my new loafers and a reinvigorated spirit. Follow the planets as they dance through the cosmos, I hear Lenny whisper in my ear.
On the coffee table, I set out several library books about planetary alignments and read about each complex cycle: three degrees of Mercury. Uranus in the Fourth House. I plot and pace across the room, summoning the celestial bodies to me. With each breath, I gather more strength. My third eye is razor-sharp.
I hear Werner’s key scratching at the front door. By now we’ve fallen into a comfortable routine. Werner, whistling off to work with his bagged lunch and a comic book. Me, reading scriptures, studying lunar cycles, keeping my heart line open to the next spiritual call.
“Werner,” I say when he strolls in, “the ancients have spoken.”
Home late from his gig at the electronic mart, I can tell he’s in a food fog because he walks straight past me, opens the freezer, and stares inside longingly as cold vapours wash over him. He’s having trouble deciding between chicken-stuffed tortellini and an all-dressed pizza topped with his favourite three-meat blend, he explains.
“There’s a delicious tomato tang to each dish,” he says, joyfully. “I love them both.”
“Love!” I grab Werner around his torso and lift him from the floor.
“Rather than divine the truth in the governing celestial bodies,” I pronounce excitedly, “I’ll send the love planet hurling through the atmosphere! Forget the Moon square Jupiter. Forget forty days of retrograde. Forget fiery Mars. I’m going to spin Venus fast forward!”
When I carefully deposit Werner back on the ground, I plant my back heel, grab hold of Libra’s ruling planet, and pitch reversing planet Venus fast forward.
The volcanic planet shudders in its orbit. My heart swells, glancing over at Werner, and a calm drapes over the room, soft as an oceanic mist.
Eager to witness this transformation close-up, I venture deep into the Venusian impact crater using my laser-sharp third eye.
Chemical collisions of oxytocin and serotonin swish inside hormonal bodies. Pulling back, I spot Yolanda, a nifty-fifty botanist with a line of cruelty-free cosmetics, swooning during a performance of Joseph Haydn’s Paris symphonies in rondeau form. She falls back into the lap of Gerome, a second-wave tech-boom titan just a shade over twenty-five, and their hypnotic attraction leads to a lustful, caffeine-buzzed affair as they crisscross the continents. One heady morning after a dolphin-cove swim, Yolanda sees her future flash before her. Envisioning her sunset years crowned by inflamed joints and flatulence, she flees to Mexico on a Vespa bound for the capital. “Oh, the cruelty of age!” she shouts, her fortified hair flowing wildly behind her. Sputtering into Mexico City, Yolanda is seduced by Octavio, owner of Zedillos café, serving Oaxaca Pluma
espresso and pesticide-free banana bread to the transnational “Hungry Generation” in the Zócalo district.
“Love is the only revolution,” Yolanda sings, her youthful voice drowned out by revellers at nearby Ranchos Las Palmas Felices, where Misty Tableau, a Halifax-born busker and part-time party planner, is spinning her juggling wand before Max, a tennis star from a recently renamed eastern republic.
Enraptured by the heady mix of spinning fire and fast-flowing tequila, Max downs a top-shelf margarita and proposes marriage. ¡Híjole! they are hot for one another! From the Baja Peninsula to Isla Aguada on the Yucatan, they explore the depths of sexual intimacy. Then, while Max is busy doing pool laps one day, he takes a near-fatal swallow of air after observing Misty juggling four wine goblets, three plates of pollo ticuleño tossed in garlic and oil, and Estaban, their chiselled towel boy. He promptly leaves her, proving that in romantic relationships, as in environmental disaster, oil and water don’t mix. Bidding Misty a mournful farewell, Max sets off in search of a romantic afterglow he may never find in another’s arms.
O sorrow’s angry purge! Love is supposed to be a dish for gods, so how in heaven’s name did this hot plate of hell happen? I glare into every loving soul, see the bitter glances, the trembling breakup talks. Anguish is spilling from every mortal pore. Then it’s as if the stars were snuffed out. The sun has skipped its place in the cosmos.
Here I am, love’s great fabricator, yet grief is ravaging the globe. And it’s my own tormented, terrified fault, I think.
Returning home, I shake two months of dust and debris from my loafers. “Werner, I have to leave again.”
“You’ve been gone forever.”
“Permanently,” I add.
“But I made chili!”
“I have no need for comfort.”
“We’ll get you a futon.”
When I turn away from him to face the bay window, Werner approaches me and takes my multiple hands into his own. On tiptoe, he tries to stare into my cyclopean third eye, but I brush him away and hold out my arms, stripping down to my tube socks.
