by Chamber Four
First it is Old Style tall boys, sitting with Liz Phair in a pub or at our kitchen table. I help myself to the complimentary champagne backstage at her concerts. I pour Bloody Marys into my coffee thermos. Sometimes when I get tipsy I can squeeze out a poem or two, which I scribble on sticky notes and stuff in my pocket. Most of the time I forget they are there, and when Liz Phair does my laundry, they come out illegible, little yellow clouds that fall apart in my hands. These are the good days. It is December now, and the city we live in is covered in a thin layer of ice. It buckles under my feet and the cracks race along the surface. I have not gotten published in months and honestly, if Liz Phair wasn’t my life partner, I wouldn’t have any money at all. At first it is easy to wash this thought away with a tall, foamy stein of Newcastle. Soon, though, the image of me as the red-carpet sideline, the K-Fed to her Britney, has penetrated my brain, filled the empty pockets and spread its plaque to even my most basic mental formations about the small things in life. I yell at the weatherman on television for being an incompetent forecaster of truth. When he doesn’t respond I holler at the cat for doing cat-like things. I find myself rinsing this emotional plaque more often until the steins become 32 oz. plastic Slurpee cups, thermoses of vodka, and finally, my lips wrapped around the neck of a bottle of cough syrup.
On New Year’s Eve, Liz Phair buys me a car. We are supposed to head out to go to this party, and I have been drinking wine while she got ready. I should feel happy about this car. It is a Prius, and I have always wanted a Prius. And I am full of wine. But I don’t have the money to buy Liz Phair a car, and the book I should have written by now is still a scattered Word document with lots of misspellings. Also, she is so much prettier than I am. I have realized this lately, when we brush our teeth side-by-side in the mornings. She has blue eyes, and firm calves, and her teeth are perfect rectangles. I want to thank her for the car, but something inside of me is triggered. Liz Phair with her perfect songs and her perfect skin and her Toyota Prius. I say she shouldn’t spend her money so frivolously—no, I use the word sluttily—even though that’s not an adverb, I make it so. I show her who is the writer here. She is hurt. I can see it in her eyes. Her blue eyes fill with tears. I take the keys and drive off, swerving down the highway with a bottle of Merlot in between my legs and nothing on the radio. When I call from jail, she answers the phone on the fourth ring. She picks me up and I ride in the front seat, silently, thinking about how the first time I got in this car, my bone was sticking out of my arm, but this time—stars smearing past the windows, her pronounced jaw clenched—this time, it hurts so much more.
That spring she is recording a new album. It is genius. When she is home, she sits in the sunroom with her guitar and whispers lyrics as she strums. She starts spending more and more time in the recording studio. I drink beer in bed and re-read Tolstoy’s dream where he is lying on a pillar, looking up into the infinity above and shaking in fear of the abyss below. “Why do I live?” he writes. “What is the purpose of it?”
“I don’t know,” I tell the paperback in my hands. “I used to think the purpose was writing, and then I was positive it was Liz Phair, and now I think I don’t know anything, nothing at all.”
A month later her handsome producing partner picks her up at night and she rides away with him in his car to the studio. I catch a glimpse of her through the bedroom window. She is laughing inside his car. They are listening to terrible music, Coldplay even, and as they drive away Chris Martin’s cocky vocals hop through the yard and smack me in the face. I pass out and dream of yellow couches being shredded by Prius-sized cheese graters. When I wake up in the morning, sunlight pushes in the window and hits the crushed beer cans like broken glass. It’s my worst nightmare: Liz Phair did not come home last night.
I look at her side of the bed. I sniff her pillow. It smells like Liz Phair when she has not showered in a day. The smell is my favorite. It tickles up my nose and pours back down out my eyes. I let it happen. I realize it’s strange how I have not cried in all these months. I did not even cry when my bone was sticking out of my arm. Not when Johnny had to be put to sleep because he swallowed a bottle of Liz Phair’s expensive cologne, not when Shirley MacLaine died in that movie. I always felt strong and brave. But why? I sit up, sniffling. I realize something. The words, like, hit me in the face. I grab the closest piece of paper—a 7-11 receipt—and I scribble them down. I use Liz Phair’s Cover Girl Outlast eyeliner. The paper surrenders in my hands, wilts against the power of my masterpiece.
I have done it. I have written The Most Perfect Sentence.
Outside, at this moment, the clouds submit to sun and the yellow beams of it course through the windowpane, highlighting everything in the room—our bed, pillows, stacks of records—but mostly the sacred seven words I hold in my hands.
I read the sentence out loud, slowly at first. The particles in the sunbeams dance like glitter. I read it again. My tongue and lips unite in a way that is most perfect, almost as holy as a Liz Phair kiss. I have perfected language, and I am not even drunk. There is only one thing to do. I fold the receipt and tiptoe out to the driveway. I leave it on Liz Phair’s car, tucked under the wiper.
She does not come home for four days.
It does not rain. The sentence performs sit-ups under the pressure of the wind and the wipers but does not move. April 6, 7, 8, 9. Those are the days she is gone.
The ghost of Liz Phair is everywhere in the house. I hear her music in my head, I think I hear her footprints on the hallway floor. At night I wonder if I can hear her breathing. I dial her cell phone seven times a day. The first time she answers she tells me not to call back, that she needs time to think about all sorts of things, like the purpose of life and her new album. Other times she does not answer the phone. I take out all the beer cans and the wine bottles and I put them in the trash out back. I do Liz Phair’s laundry, pressing her soft green hoodie to my nose. I paint the living room a cool lavender. I write poems about all of this, which I print and stack neatly in binders. I put them in manila envelopes and send them away to magazines. I think about praying. On the fifth day, I walk to the grocery store and put apples in my basket.
While I am at the store, Liz Phair finally comes home. Her handsome producing partner drops her off. I begin to walk back along the leaf-lined street. I think at this point it’s helpful to imagine this scene from an aerial view, with the streets stretching out like an arcade game and me and Liz Phair are like Pac-Men, little dots moving along the lines. We do not see one another, but as we move closer, our bodies begin to pick up signals the other’s give off; our auras are magnetic, they are pulling us together and we do not even know it. My stomach growls a bit, her palms feel tingly.
She notices the white slip of paper on her car. She picks it up and unfolds it. Her eyes move back and forth over the words—once, twice, then four times. The sunlight catches the tear that begins to form in her eyes. She turns to the east and begins running. She can feel my energy vibrating from the store down the street. She follows that. The two Pac-Men move along the sidewalks, getting closer and closer. A sudden breeze quivers the trees. She grabs a skateboard from a neighbor’s yard and skates down the middle of the road, knees bent, arms to the sides. Her hood slips over her eyes and for a brief moment, the neighbors marvel at Liz Phair, skateboarding down the middle of their street, looking just like the cover of her first album.
It ends with me getting hit by Liz Phair on a skateboard. I fall, and the two apples fly into the sky upon impact. She looks down at me and curses. I stand up. She is Liz Phair. She is four inches shorter than I am, but standing on the skateboard, we are almost even. She looks me in the eyes. A leaf falls from the tree and skitters the side of my cheek, drifts to the ground. I catch my reflection in a car window and notice for the first time that I too have a glow about me, all around my face.
Eupcaccia*
by Angie Lee
from Witness
_________
*From Ko
bo Abe's The Ark Sakura, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 7-8. “[On this] Island (the insect’s native habitat), eupcaccia is the word for “clock.” Half an inch long, the insect is of the order Coleoptera, and has a stubby black body lined with vertical brown stripes. Its only other distinguishing feature is its lack of legs, those appendages having atrophied because the insect has no need to crawl about in search of food. It thrives on a peculiar diet—its own feces. The idea of ingesting one’s own waste products for nourishment sounds about as ill-advised as trying to start a fire from ashes; the explanation lies, it seems, in the insect’s extremely slow rate of consumption, which allows plenty of time for the replenishment of nutrients by bacterial action. Using its round abdomen as a fulcrum, the eupcaccia pushes itself around counterclockwise with its long, sturdy antennae, eating as it eliminates. As a result, the excrement always lies in a perfect half-circle. It begins ingesting at dawn and ceases at sunset, then sleeps till morning. Since its head always points in the direction of the sun, it also functions as a timepiece.”
_________
The row of mailboxes in front of Tewa Trailer Park in Tesuque, New Mexico, reads from left to right: W.C., Mr. & Mrs. Chicken, Joy Vanderloo, T. J. Apodaca, Santi Chun-Mogul, the Orcistas, Esquibels, Benscooters, Justice, and E. Eagle. An “E-normous” and wholly intact spiderweb extends from the plastic lip of W.C.’s receptacle and connects to the corner of a cinder block several feet away. Shoved inside the cinder block’s cool arches are the spider’s previous attempts to conquer the distance, balled-up practice sessions of dry, white discharge. At least a million fire ants roam the park, slinging gravel, dead ants, and food. The surrounding yellowed soil is stained with miles of their invisible language. Sagebrush, chamisa, and other brittle-stemmed shrubs bend upon contact and perfume the air, but otherwise the flora shows no signs of change from season to season. Only E. Eagle’s mailbox, swaybacked and half ajar, gives an indication of the passage of time. The mail carrier stacks E.’s weekly magazine, sheathed in black plastic, on top of his box, and since E. Eagle collects his mail but once a month the pile-up is a good indication how far into the month it is. On the Chickens’ mailbox, the letters “+Mal” have been scribbled on the face in a harried stroke, as though something special would fail to be delivered if written any slower. The Chickens’ box, as well as the Benscooters’, is missing the red flag for outgoing mail.
Beyond the Chickens’ trailer park is an empty lot that marks the beginning of what locals call “Auto Row,” where what started several years ago as one store selling leather conditioner and piñon-scented car freshener gradually turned into an entire community of auto repair and auto parts/junk shops. By order of his mom, the neighborhood is off limits for Malchicken, even though she secretly lusts after all of it—the whole eight blocks from Roget’s to Sven’s—for she knows every man there is wearing a jumpsuit. Each shop along the Row has a different animal mascot, and a fierce competition takes place thirty feet above ground, in neon. Roget’s badger wears a black beret, and he’s smoking an unattached mouse’s tail in one hand and strangle-holding Marson’s little mouse head in the other. Every time the badger pumps his biceps, the mouse’s bent whiskers light up in sequence. Malchicken’s dad used to say the proximity to Auto Row was a good thing, and that the lights were there to make ordinary days seem like holidays. His mom used to argue that it was so bright she could see the screws coming down on the lid of her coffin.
The buzzing from Roget’s neon sign stings the back of Mal’s head, just underneath the wide cup of his skull. A similar tone comes out of the television speaker when Malchicken’s mother shuts off the DVD player but forgets to power down the TV. The screen turns gray, and the letters DVD appear in mainframe-green, matching hue to tone. Malchicken doesn’t have to be in the room to know it’s on. The two sounds together make his skin feel like it’s being pulled off in sheets.
Recently, Marson’s Lube and Oil has installed a new neon sign in which his French mouse, donning an apron and smoking a thin cigarette, is clubbing poor Roget’s badger with a rolling pin. The fall of the badger in lights is beautiful to watch—a crumbling arc of green and brown dotted with droplets of blood—but the real treat is watching the three doughnut-shaped puffs of dirt rise as the body collapses on the ground. Malchicken has heard that Marson originally wanted the badger to fester into little shapes that curled into croissants, but the sign company said it was too difficult. Though Malchicken loves the new sign, he’s harboring the hope Roget will fight back with something better, if not a little quieter.
Using the same kind of rolling pin as the mouse, Mal has created in the kitchen a miniature city made of puff-pastry cylinders. As heat penetrates the structures, the layers of dough will rise to towering heights with anally plumb walls, barring any shortcomings in craftsmanship. The Chickens’ oven does not have a light and as the pastry swells, the glass steams over, preventing even the faintest glimpse of how the construction is going inside. On the bottom of the window is etched the word PERMA-VIEW, and the glass is cracked from top to bottom which produces a fragment the shape of New Hampshire. Or Vermont. Mal can’t quite remember the ditty he learned from Lernie the Online E-tutor at school about how to tell the two states apart. Which one points up and which one points down. Sealed tight inside the turrets of puff pastry, Malchicken has installed a savory stew made of chicken and beans. It’s wet-battered and egg-glazed so the surface will finish on the rich side of amber, the girlie side of brown. Though he’s added a few cherries for color, he knows at the end of the line the stuff is going to come out brown. The bowel end of the line. The brown end. Auto-chromatically. Brown, brown, brown. And now he’s got the mini camera to prove it. It’s regal, it’s pizzazz, the way it works, and real spirit-fueling.
At the sound of a hiss in the oven, Malchicken begins to fret. He knows the sound is telling him that liquid inside the pastry is drilling its way outward and falling to a carbonized hell. It’s a sign of shoddy workmanship. Working with previously frozen chicken parts and dried beans, it’s hard to control the moisture. The hissing may also be a wicked ploy taunting Mal to open up the oven door—do it do it do it—a reckless action that will release the heat trapped inside and end in disaster. It’s a bread-knife-to-the-sternum type of experience, the hissing, the wanting to know, the splintery edge of sawed bone. His best bet is to leave the kitchen and let the baking run its course, to retreat to his room’s darkness, disturbed only by a lukewarm moon. Setting the egg timer, which sounds out each painful second, on the sill, Mal pulls open the curtains, spraying beads of condensation diagonally across the glass. Mal takes a shy finger to the window, outlining shapes and cross-hatching them in with fat little squiggles. Freshly moistened dust tickles his nose. The bleating of the egg is steady.
Malchicken takes his head to the pillow, unbuckling his pants as he reclines. By the side of his bed there’s a wire he can pull which causes a mobile hanging above his head to spin. His body is a doughy exaggeration of an obese child. Born without the well-sectioned Chicken neck, Mal’s head-to-torso slope makes him a true pyramid-shaped American, according to FDA standards. Golden brown hair from his long pin head graces the tops of his shoulders where the tips bounce with princely charm. His wads of fat are segmented and move independent of each other, colliding to form peaks and valleys. The color of his skin is that of un-fired porcelain with undertones of scarlet and lavender. Next to his skin the threadbare fabric of his underwear appears velvety, sophisticated, and magical in hue.
With a yawn, Mal rolls over and pulls out from under the bed a jimmy-rigged little VCR and B/W monitor. The two are connected to each other via a fat black cable that he fondles awkwardly. The video he’s about to watch is a Malchicken masterpiece. It was shot using a mini self-leveling camera now tucked away inside a flannel pouch he keeps on his nightstand. The camera’s original use—fastened to a metal skid and attached to 200 feet of cable through which was pushed twelve gallons of wa
ter per minute from the back of a Santa Fe County sewer truck—was to go headfirst into clogged sewer systems and record the journey into darkness. Mal considers sending the camera into the kitchen to peer into the oven and laughs. He would be single-handedly responsible for improving the camera’s worldview. It’s perspective. From poop to pastries. He cups his head between his hands and sets the video to Play. Seconds pass before an image comes into focus.
* * * *
The Chickens’ septic system had always been a “ball breaker,” and the way it “worked” had all three of them practicing the ancient art of inhalation and retention before crossing the threshold. Even without the contributions of Mr. Chicken over the last few years, the tank “kept its own way of thinking,” and Mrs. Chicken tried everything (short of liquefying the load before sending it down, and Malchicken had to threaten her with a kitchen knife before she conceded to let go of the blender) to keep the flow moving. She learned how to tighten up a loose-lipped plunger, and the importance of a flexible rod. Again and again she replaced the water-stained poster behind the seat showing two hands clasped in prayer and the words “Easy Does It” written underneath. Yet still the rebellious commode had difficulties swallowing, and a string of plumbers started coming up the aluminum steps of the Chicken trailer, until one by one they started to stay—later and later—until they showed up at breakfast taking their coffee black and their toast dry, their rolls having been slickly buttered all night.
