Just a Couple of Days

by Tony Vigorito

  Despite my accommodations, I slept as soundly as a baby sloth for over ten hours, and only awoke when General Kiljoy roused me the next morning for a breakfast of canned chicken. He and Tynee spent the morning disposing of the remains of Meeko and Volt, then went searching for Agent Orange and any clues as to what exactly had happened the day before. I spent the afternoon in my makeshift holding cell while nicotine weanling Miss Mary huffed Wrinkle-B-Gon fabric relaxant and watched satellite television. Local stations were no longer broadcasting, the situation being what it was.

  I was lucky to be separated by a steel door from her. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in over fifteen hours, and like a klismaphiliac without a rubber hose, there was just no way she could be satisfied. Despite her efforts, neither television nor Wrinkle-B-Gon sufficed to ease her craving. By the looks of her at breakfast, she had not slept all night, and she spoke to us as if we were squirting water pistols at her. Fortunately, having located some instant coffee, everyone else’s addiction was appeased.

  I thought I might watch some television through the small window in the door, but Miss Mary switched the channels en-ragingly often, like a chimp perusing endless varieties of pornographic bananas. Having nothing else to do but sit in the chair and stare at where Blip was yesterday, I examined the contents of my pockets and found the toilet paper transcription I had made of Blip’s voice-mail greeting. Racing on three cups of powdered coffee, I resolved right there to pay my debt and honor Blip’s request. Not quite knowing what to think of the second part of my penance, I focused on the first part and began to write a record of these events, and now here I am.

  110 A host of unsatisfactory first paragraphs later, I got up to stretch and happened to glance out the window at Miss Mary. Apparently confident that nobody was looking, she held a half-eaten apple in her hand, a desirable commodity given our current food situation. She was chewing furiously, perhaps satisfying her oral fixation, taking bites without pausing to swallow. In so doing, a bead of apple juice lingered on her lower lip, glistening in the piped-down late afternoon sun like an orb of paradise. As she licked the nectar away with her tobacco-stained tongue, she looked around and made dead eye contact with me, startling us both. She froze, transfixed with a grimace of horrific self-consciousness, a sick look of frantic guilt, as if she were not in a bomb shelter but a garden, a plentiful, perfectly balanced garden of Earthly delights, and she had just devoured the forbidden fruit, the fruit of knowledge, self-awareness, self-consciousness, and was now facing an eternity of alienated existence filled with all manifestations of egoism.

  Compared to the potential excesses of pride or anger, hiding and then hogging the only fresh food in the compound is a minor misdeed. It is gluttony, however, and all such behavior is motivated by the same fundamental selfishness, though now is not the time for such mealy mysticism. Miss Mary had concealed her possession of an apple and was as far from any Garden of Eden as could be imagined. She asserted herself by turning back to the television screen and finishing her apple, effectively pretending my perspective out of her reality.

  As it happened, that particular apple was the probable vector for a disarmingly virulent strain of intestinal influenza in our otherwise disinfected compound. I suppose we were fortunate that the outdated food supply was not spoiled. This was established because Miss Mary had not touched any of the food rations when she fell ill later that evening. Tynee and General Kiljoy assumed she must have picked up the virus earlier in the day.

  The rest of us had joined her in fever by the following morning. After having vague, nondescript nightmares of terrifying helicopters all night long, I awoke to a frenzied hallucination of the entire universe being sucked through a swirling vortex centered around my stomach. The vision returned with a profound nausea whenever I flushed the toilet. Gardyloo.

  For the next three days, the four of us alternated between lying flat on our backs or stumbling to the bathroom. The fever dumped me into a torturous state of insane introspection, and guilt welled up within me along with the bile. “Serves me right” throbbed relentlessly through my head like a schizophrenic mantra. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t squeal on Miss Mary.

  Big General Kiljoy, built like a brick shithouse, as they say, was pulverized by this tiny strand of RNA worse than anyone, and was too sick to care about anything except having priority in our own little brick shithouse.

  111 How I wished for Sophia and Blip to stop by with one of their herbal remedies, which, they assured me, worked precisely because they were not prescribed by Western medicine. When I had the stomach flu once before, they came over an hour after they found out and set up a juicing machine in my kitchen to squeeze the juice out of some wheatgrass they grew in the garden behind their dome. It smelled like lawn clippings, but good gracious to grasshoppers, a couple of hours later I was sitting upright. My stomach remained sensitive, and I wasn’t reaching for the jalapeños, but I was definitely recovering, as sure as a blade of grass regrows after meeting the blade of a lawn mower. I don’t want to dispense landscaping advice without a license here, but it worked, and as I lay there retching and reeling in agony, I would have traded my John Deere for a single shot of that grass juice.

  112 I once spent an autumn Saturday chatting with Blip as he encouraged his garden, harvesting wheatgrass and transplanting tulip bulbs. He never asked for assistance, but in retrospect, I’m not sure why I didn’t offer to help. Maybe it was my suburban childhood, maybe it was my irritation at being invited over for a brunch that was not immediately forthcoming. Blip made no sign of ceasing his gardening, and I churlishly inquired when food would be available soon after I arrived.

  “Haven’t a clue,” he grunted with horticultural satisfaction. “Sophia cooks on weekends.”

  “Where’s she?”

  Blip ignored me and held up a flower bulb. “Tulips. I can’t figure out where these keep coming from. This is the third year I’ve found them in my dandelion patch.”

  “What’s wrong with tulips?”

  “Nothing, I guess. They’re pretty enough. I just prefer dandelions. They’re sturdy, sunny, and they can take care of themselves. Why tiptoe through the tulips when you can dance through the dandelions?” He rose, strode a few feet to his left, and began digging a small hole to transplant the bulb into. “Did you know that in the 1600s, the Dutch used to think these were worth fortunes? Better than money. During the Tulpenwoede, the tulip mania, an entire brewery was bought and sold for one tulip bulb. People mortgaged homes, you name it, just to invest in tulip bulbs.”

  “Where did you say Sophia was?” I interrupted him, hungry and hypoglycemic.

  “Probably up a tree somewhere,” he replied offhandedly. “Don’t misunderstand me. Tulips are nice, but just because some people agreed these runty little roots were worth something, they were.” He patted the soil down, tucking the bulb to bed for the winter. “Ah well,” he shrugged. “They’re certainly worth a tidy sum more than paper.”

  113 Later, as Blip carried his garden tools back to the shed, Sophia’s voice munched through the crunching of an apple overhead. “Why do you suppose Eve was doubly condemned for sharing her apple?” We looked up to where she sat, barefoot and perched on a comfortable branch, her long cotton skirt pregnant with a peck of apples. She may well have been asking the tree, for she never looked our way.

  “It wasn’t sharing, it was misery loves company,” I answered, pleased with my rude wit and my view of the inside of her thighs, which were as smooth as a pebble in a swift-water streambed.

  “Quick.” Sophia smiled, commending me, delighted with any sort of wit. She took a final bite out of her apple and tossed the core toward some nearby brush. In so doing, she lost her balance just long enough to let go of her skirt and grab a branch. The cargo less important than the transport, it was an easy decision to make. I survived the consequent avalanche of apples much less hurt than you’d think I would be. I even caught one.

  Sophia fluttered down from the tree, unen
cumbered, unhurt, and pleased as a peach in fourth grade, or a plum in fifth. “I was wondering how I was going to get all those apples out of the tree,” she marveled.

  “Gravity,” said Blip, intended more as a Newtonian observation than an answer.

  “I’m okay,” I assured them, taking a bite out of the apple I had caught.

  “Don’t ruin your appetite,” Sophia counseled.

  “Why?” I asked covetously. “What’s for lunch?”

  Sophia looked up from gathering the fallen fruit, looking as miserable as a child practicing cartwheels. “Apples, of course.”

  114 Strictly speaking, we did not have apples for brunch, but Sophia was never very disciplined in her use of language. She could often be heard uttering phrases that made no intrinsic sense. Nevertheless, because she spoke with such absolute conviction, her nonsense made others stop and think. Blip and Dandy never hesitated to reply with something equally meaningless, leaving anyone else present all the more mystified. That said, we had apples for brunch, yes, organic apples, but more specifically we had apple pancakes with applesauce, ringed with apple wedges and washed down with freshly squeezed apple juice for Dandy and aged applejack cider for the grownups. It was an autumnal adoration of apples.

  Blip and I were recruited to cut apples in the preparation of the meal, a tedious task made easier by their broken kitchen knives. I held one up and asked why a rivet was gone from the handles of all their knives, causing the blade to come off the grip at an angle rather than straight.

  “Unnecessary linearity,” Blip replied. “Nature isn’t that tidy. Your hand comes off your forearm at an angle. See? Now look at the way these blades line up with your forearm. That’s where the straight line belongs. Ergonomically, all tools should be angled like that. Not only does it make hammering or cutting easier, it reduces the stress on your joints. It’s true. I overheard it in a coffeehouse.”

  “So you broke all your knives?”

  “I didn’t break them, I fixed them. They were broken to begin with, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nothing is as it should be in this society. The handles of all tools should be at a 23.5-degree angle to the head of the tool. Why on Earth would anyone think it would be a straight line, or a ninety-degree angle, which never occurs in nature? That’s just asinine. If you drew an angle of the human grasp relative to the straight line of their forearm, it would be 23.5 degrees, or its supplement, depending on your point of view, of course.” He made a show of effortlessly slicing an apple. “Mother Nature is messy by our standards, as messy as birth, but she’s also sly that way.”

  “As sly as a dime,” Sophia asserted.

  “And no straight lines,” Blip continued, “but perfect parallels all over creation.” He flipped his knife in the air, catching it again by the handle like some hotshot delicatessen cook. “Twenty-three point five degrees.” He held up the knife for inspection. “See? The angle of the human grip is the same as the tilt of the Earth.”

  115 In the opinion of Dr. Blip Korterly, I try too hard. That he points this out to me when I am impatient or angry is unfortunate. Offering advice to an angry person is like congratulating a sleeping insomniac with a slap on the back. It is not only ineffective but also bothersome and entirely counterproductive. Nevertheless, he persisted in his self-righteous gestures of goodwill, and I continued to roll my eyes, until one day his point came through at last. As required, I was in high spirits already from the six-pack of fine Irish stout the two of us had shared that evening.

  “Did you know that Sophia taught me how to rock climb?” His foot began to twitch like a hesitant sewing machine. “She scrambles right up the side of a rock like a gazelle sprinting across a prairie. I had a difficult time with it at first. She drove me crazy telling me to ‘Let go, let go,’ like she was my Jedi master or something. I wasn’t about to let go. I clung to the rock face with all my might, and for two seasons I couldn’t get past the bottom of this one crack three-quarters of the way up the rock we usually climbed. My arms would start shaking, trying to maintain equilibrium, and I couldn’t move a limb without losing my balance. Eventually, I had to let go and let the harness take me, but that isn’t what she meant. She wanted me to stop trying so hard and to just do what felt right.

  “And you know what? She was absolutely correct. I finally understood what she meant one afternoon when she yelled, ‘Move your ass!’ instead of ‘Let go.’ I moved my ass, automatically I guess, and tucked my waist close to the rock face. All of a sudden, I was able to pull my body up the remaining portion of the crevice. It was unbelievably easy. Exhilarating. I whooped and hollered at my stubborn realization, and Sophia wouldn’t let me down until I apologized for not listening to her earlier.

  “The point, Flake, is I learned that day that I had a bad habit.” Blip’s leg was now tapping so furiously it could have out-stitched an underpaid overseas garment worker. “My technique wasn’t working, but I kept trying to make it work through brute force. That’s like using toenail clippers to trim hedges. If you’re trying too hard, then you’re trying too hard. When I changed my technique, things became practically effortless. An unbalanced body can’t be strong or graceful or effective at anything, because it doesn’t know which direction to focus its energies.

  “So, whenever you find yourself putting forth great effort without success, you’re trying to force something that will not fit under the circumstances. That’s a destructive waste of time. And if that isn’t enough to keep in mind, your techniques must always be allowed to evolve and change, in relationships, in life, in science, in society. Otherwise you stagnate, and you won’t get anywhere in the long run.” He sat down and swallowed the swill at the bottom of his glass. “You know what the philosopher Aldous Huxley said? He said, ‘Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.’ Well-spoken, you’d surely agree, since he considered the manipulation of genetic structures one of the three major scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.” He sat back and relaxed, his feet as motionless as a forgotten thimble in an old sewing trunk in an attic.

  “What were the other two?”

  Blip yawned. “The splitting of the atom and the rediscovery of psychedelics.”

  116 Habit, habit, habit, habit, habit, habit, habit, habit, habit. Say habit until you forget what it means, and you’ve broken a habit (a habit, if you’ve forgotten, is an involuntary tendency to act constantly in a certain manner). Habit, habit, habit. There are good habits, such as smiling at strangers, and bad habits, such as picking your nose and wiping the boogers under the couch. Habits are addictions. You can be addicted to love, which is generally a good habit, or you can be addicted to heroin, which, terminal patients aside, is not the most desirable of habits. The angle of our tools is a habit, as is everything from the design of our automobiles to the design of our teacups. It is not an exaggeration to say that society is an immense conglomeration of obsessive-compulsive habits.

  Scalded tongues could be vanquished. I say this because I paused to sip my instant coffee here, and am reminded that in addition to turning his ordinary, straight and narrow kitchen knives into a pack of freewheeling culinary cutups, Blip also chipped the handles off all the teacups in their house, no doubt with an angled hammer. He did this after he learned that the Zen tea ceremony is performed using cups with no handles to prevent one from drinking the tea while it is too hot. If the cup is too hot to pick up, it’s too hot to drink, a simple logic that eludes our fast-food culture. And while a cup of coffee at a fastfood dump has no handle, the clowns put it in Styrofoam, which is even worse since it doesn’t conduct heat at all. Ergonomics, patience, and ceremony are homeless in the land of opportunity. Habit, habit, habit. We don’t have to do things the way we do them, it’s just habit.

  Habit, habit, habit. Western society, in the condition it’s been for the last few centuries, has been shamelessly picking its nose, flicking and wiping gooey debris every which way. Society, present
ly conceived, is a disgusting habit, and just because everyone pretends not to notice doesn’t make it okay.

  117 “What exactly does that mean?” Sophia asked me after an extended period of silence at our apple luncheon. I raised my eyebrows and resisted asking her to what she was referring, for she frequently left her demonstratives undefined. It was a long wait, and I nearly gave in, but she finally elaborated. “Misery loves company. Is that supposed to mean that miserable people strive to make others miserable just for some company, or does it mean that miserable people love to have company, because it cheers them up?”

  “We’re not miserable.” Dandy, perhaps five at the time, happily popped a piece of pancake into her mouth.

  “Not at all,” Sophia assured her.

  “I think it’s the first meaning,” I replied. “Miserable people want to make others miserable for the company.”

  “But says who? The structure of the words can be taken either way. The second way is much more positive. Miserable people just want to have some company to cheer them up. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “I like company,” Dandy added.

  “Well, that’s not what I meant when I said it,” I replied, defending my earlier witticism like a grammarian who insists that ain’t ain’t a word. If it works, use it, and let us evolve already. Habit, habit, habit.