by Chamber Four
For Malchicken, it was bad enough to hear the snide comments making the rounds—from plumber to car mechanic to casino dog—that the jobs at the Chicken trailer paid double time because there was more than one hole to plunge. It was crazy enough to notice how the shirt his mother wore in the mornings had an embroidered name on it that was not similar to the embroidered name affixed to the jumpsuit the stranger in the house was wearing, not similar as in not like Richard is to Dick or Jonathan to John. It was creepy enough to see the same stranger clang knife to fork as his mother offered to pack him a lunch, placing two fruit rolls, a soda, a de-crusted sandwich, and an oversized piece of dessert into a used paper bag that was so soft and worn it made no noise as she opened it up. She would pause, one hand holding the bag while the other yanked open drawers, to find a little something, a knife, a bottle opener, a wooden spoon, anything with some kind of durable value, in the hopes that the plumber would have the conscience to return it, along with himself, later that evening. It was depressing enough to watch his mother take the green keno pencil she’s saved all these years from the Chickens’ honeymoon in Vegas, its point a massive halberd in her hand, and cross off the listings for plumbers, carving ruts through poultry, printing, qigong and whatever else followed the letters P-L in the big yellow book. But no. What really battered Malchicken’s drummettes, what really dusted his marbles, was that his mother didn’t think the self-leveling camera was worth paying for.
Sure she’d open up the coffers for the extra pressure, the repeat thrusts and sleek flow-through mechanisms, but when they asked if she wanted to capture the underground tunnel on videotape she told them she had seen enough crap. “What’s to see anyway?” she’d ask. “Just get that can moving.” Unlike Mal, she didn’t care to see if what was coming in was going out.
One evening while his mother had gone to her room to freshen up, Mal asked a sour-mouthed plumber whether he had ever used one of the little sewer cameras. Without answering he demanded, with short tommy-gun exhalations, to know who told him to ask. When Mal didn’t say anything the plumber grabbed Mal by the back of his neck and demanded to know where Pop Chicken was.
“I know about these things, and whoa, just tell me if I’m gonna have to get my fists ready.”
“?”
“Whoa. Watch me.”
“...” Mal shook his head.
“If your old man comes through that door tonight, watch me if I don’t knock him flat.”
“...”
“I’m not going to play no tool.”
“He’s not,” Mal muttered, squirming.
“If he does tonight, I’ll do him.”
“Not coming.”
“Dead flat. You hear?”
“...” Mal shrugged.
“Whump.”
“...”
“Wham.” The plumber placed a fist softly on Malchicken’s chin.
“...”
“Too-nite.” The plumber repeated, angling his head repeatedly toward the bedroom. He let go of Mal’s neck and moved his hands until they held him by the sides, and with his giant palms he pushed the tips of Mal’s shoulders inwards. There was a hint of a massage. So slight, Mal had to unclench his stomach in order to discern whether it was real. The plumber kept rubbing and said, “I know about those cameras. Oh...I know. Let me tell you what happened last time I had a run in with an angry husband. It wasn’t...heh, heh, surprise, surprise...” and now a wry chuckle passed through his lips, “due to any mis-plunging of my own.... No... It was only that I was doing my job too well.”
“...”
“See, I had gotten a house call, and I show up with my high-tech video thee-ruster ready to visualate the stubborn blockage. Here I was showing my customer the clarity and detail of the flexy-cam thee-ruster as we’re going down his pipe. It’s a beauty! But, a few feet into it, just as we get a rhythm going, WHUMP, the camera stops.”
“Clarity and detail,” Malchicken repeated.
“We look into the monitor, right, and it was awful clear what it was. Clear as day, and I swear to you the bastard looked yellow, and I know how the picture here’s only black and white but there it was...yellow.”
“Yellow.”
“Sure as heck that bastard was clogging the pipe, along with a shitload of hair, and not far from it was the little foil package it came in. Came in.... Ha ha. It was a...you know...” the plumber snarled, using a gesture with two fingers to encircle his groin. “One of them lubed pups. Rib-bed.”
The plumber finished the pantomime and his hands went back to Mal’s neck. Mal felt seasick and embarrassed and he started giggling, as if a skit intended as slapstick had knocked an old lady down and she was writhing in pain.
“You get my joke, do you?” The plumber laughed. “It was a clear I.D. And from the look on my customer’s face, whoa, I could tell right away the ’lil bastard had not been a mutual purchase in this household, meaning husband and wife had not selected that piece of family planning together.”
“...” Malchicken swallowed hard.
“He stared at me and said ‘motherfucker.’ I tried nosing the blockage some more. The bastard wasn’t budging. He said to me ‘Motherfucker that fucking motherfucker.’ I said it sure looked like one. Yup. He said ‘Motherfucker it’s...I...I don’t...I don’t...no, not me. No, no, no, no, no. One does not make an ass out of me. Motherfucking cocksucker.’ I kept my nodding. So then the guy calls up his wife who was in a meeting so he leaves her this sweet little message about how there had been an emergency and could she come home at once. After that he hung up and started whacking himself with the phone. Like this. In the head. Blap. Then he got tired of that and hurled it into the bathtub. The batteries went flying everywhere and he went and pitched them one by one into the bedroom.”
“...”
“Motherfucker comes back to the bathroom and takes me by the neck. Here, like this,” the plumber said, swinging Mal around and locking one arm around his neck. “And he screams, ‘Bitch! You’re dead bitch! Dead, you hear? Bitch, you’re dead!’”
Mal gagged and tried to pull away from the plumber’s chest.
“And he kept going on, like this, saying, ‘You’re so dead! Bitch!’ And so I...” The plumber released the pressure around Mal’s neck, and reversed the set-up by grabbing Mal’s arm so that it went around the plumber’s own neck. “Here, pretend you’re him and you’re strangling me. Come on, harder. Pull.” His fingers prodded at Mal’s arm to get him to tighten his grip. “Come on, harder...yeah, harder. So he’s trying to kill me, right? So then I had to do this....” In one move the plumber twisted around and spun out from the headlock into a position where he had maneuvered Mal’s arm behind Mal’s back and bent his own knee up Malchicken’s crotch. “To save my life,” the plumber said, breathlessly. He grumbled about how doing that move against the husband, who was much larger than him, tore his knee a little. He wiggled the hurt leg, shook his head, and then he farted.
The following morning, under a one-ply cover, Malchicken discovered the plumber’s discarded pond of man-flow in the bathroom trash. It was ripe, yellow and cautiously seeping.
When the Chickens’ toilet finally ceased all activity, not even a limp bloop or a minor glug, Mrs. Chicken grabbed her keno pencil and skipped to the end of the plumbers’ section. The minute Harold Zamcochyan’s boots struck across the living room floor, Mal started perspiring with excitement. This guy wasn’t going to fart around, literally. He didn’t blink at the sight of the water damage stains on the floor, and didn’t recoil when his steel-toed boot took a dip near the base of the toilet. Most importantly, he told the puffy-faced and flirtatious Mrs. Chicken that he was going to send in the camera or else he wasn’t taking the job. She chewed on her sleeve and considered her options. “Will it take long?” she finally asked. Malchicken stood behind her and peered at the plumber through the long “O” of his tightly curled hands. The plumber’s jumpsuit was embroidered with the name “Hobie.”
Before set
ting his knees down to work, Hobie moved aside the purple gingham toilet paper cozy and tugged at his pants several times, hooking his fingers deep into the belt loops. But, as head went to hole, the denim slipped and the curved tip of his vertical crack popped up and said yes’m. It was, to Mal, an impenetrable, onerous pit—and here he had to snigger—a pit probably a lot like the one the man was himself facing head on.
Without turning around, the man muttered something indiscernible; his breath rippled over the surface of the bowl like a scrunched up sheet of plastic food wrap. Mal watched the darkened wet patch on the knee of the man’s pant leg spread upwards to his thighs and across towards his ankles at the same chilling rate. One of the plastic caps intended to cover the toilet’s unsightly bolts had been knocked off and now floated toward him. Inside, there was something colorful resembling chewed peas and carrots, with dried clumps of hairy matter. It tried to dock on his shoe so Mal shuffled over to let it pass into the hallway. The water level was high enough to carry it over the threshold, and up and over it went. The sewer man again barked something, and moved aside invasive clumps of clotted toilet paper with the back of his hand while he prepared the cable. He had hairless, dimpled skin on his back, and—hunched over as he was—a scruff of neck-meat so large Mal thought that if at that very moment the Tsunami was to come into the Chicken trailer, without a doubt Mal would need both hands to grab hold of Hobie.
Three hours later—having sent in the camera, viewed footage of dense video grain, retracted the cable, and shook it near his ear several times—the plumber got off his knees and sent out a request for the two Chickens to come into the room. He spat into the bowl, sending a sheet of honey-like liquid over the edge. A dry spider scaled the edge of the crumpled toilet paper cozy and dodged in and out of sight. Mal (who had never left) poked his head into the hallway and called for his mother. She came, nearly tripping over the cheap gold molding missing a cheap gold screw, one hand lifting a sweaty lock of hair from her cheek and the other holding the prodigal plastic cap. Hobie glanced from one Chicken to the other, panning for a visual clue that would explain what was wrong with their pipe.
The Chickens looked at each other and then back at him. Malchicken leaned into the monitor and examined his reflection. Mrs. Chicken whispered “Problem?” and handed him the plastic cap. The sewer man turned his gaze into the hole and said very slowly and very loudly, as if addressing non-English speakers. “What...all did you throw down there?” In his voice was the hope that one of the Chickens would fess up to jettisoning a weird exotic baby animal or a portion of unfinished potato salad, but no go. Mrs. Chicken looked to her son for a response. Mal was busy wondering if shaking his head would be a bad answer or a good one. The plumber growled with impatience. Mrs. Chicken started to nod and then changed it to a no, and then nodded.
“Honest injun. No. Nope. Nothing. It’s just...just...well. That’s it. Just us. Down there.”
“Well,” the plumber said without conviction. “I am blasting water like the dickens through there and can’t move this thing a friggin’ inch.” He wagged the cable at them.
“Broken?” asked Mal, reaching for the camera.
“This here video camera attached here is supposed to light up and show what’s going on down there. These guys here are LED lights.”
“...”
“Look at it here, they’re on.”
“On.”
“I send it down, and they don’t work.”
“Here?” asked Mal, tracing a circle around the lights and watching the reaction on the monitor.
“It’s totally black once you get down in there.”
“Down in there,” Mal said convincingly.
“Without the lights I just can’t see what the devil is in your pipes.”
“See...See?” Mrs. Chicken muttered, throwing her arms up. “I just don’t know what there is to really look at.”
“And there’s nothing that’s moving it. I keep hitting it, HARD.”
“Hard.”
“Three hundred pounds of torque on this skid.”
“Hard,” Mal repeated, spinning the camera.
“Penetrating nozzle with thruster jets.”
“Thruster jets.”
“And two thousand pounds of water per square inch and I can’t move your matter?”
“Moof.”
“Christ, you’re an annoying kid.”
“Moof.”
“...”
“...”
“If you really need to see...”
“...”
“I’ve got a flashlight in the kitchen,” Mrs. Chicken said.
“Swell.”
“How about some coffee?” she asked, tucking the sweaty lock behind her ear.
The plumber grunted. “Great. That should really teach this toilet a lesson.”
“It’s decaf,” Mrs. Chicken whispered, placing a proud hand on her hip.
“Christ.”
“...”
“...”
“Is that a yes?”
“Lady, what did you throw down there?”
“I told you. Nothing. It’s just us. And besides, I don’t know what there is to see, really.”
“Shit.” The plumber replied, unscrewing and tossing the LED self-leveling camera into the corner.
* * * *
Mal’s video begins with a ridge of soft bumps that form the letter M. The camera then backs up until it’s obvious there are teeth on both sides and the hot presence of a tongue. Retreating further, it passes lips and emerges into broad daylight to move up the greasy length of a nose. The lens tickles the tips of eyelashes and stares down an unflinching eyeball. Then Malchicken’s whole face appears, alongside its reflection in a mirror; chin-to-chin, there’s a tantalizing view up all four nostrils. His face goes through surprise, happiness, anger, confusion, frustration, and contemplation. Look—here’s his mother, a slanted doorway, and a hand goes up to block her face. Out in the living room, there’s a matchstick swizzled in candle wax and a partial fingerprint marring a photograph of a large crowd cheering a car race. The velvet backing the photograph is the darkest black there is. Suddenly there’s a hot flash of fluorescence, followed by an examination of the faceplate of the light switch, its screw heads perfectly vertical. Droplets of moisture define a half-destroyed spider’s web, shown with the light on and then off. On. Off. On. A painful minute focused on the spider’s leg, jerky, electric, disco.
A close-up of something sways like a worm, and when the camera pulls back it’s a loose thread from the elastic cuff of Mrs. Chicken’s shirt. The tulip pattern on the fabric. Suddenly the camera is jerked as if hit by something hard; it’s Mrs. Chicken’s rings as her hand wraps over the camera’s head. Mal’s hand peels hers away. The camera tumbles to the ground.
The latch of the bathroom door going in and out looks like a darting fish. The cheap gold molding still looks cheap in black and white. Inside the bathroom, there are mineral deposits clinging to the showerhead, the bleached corner of the bathtub where the soap lives and slowly decays, dark patches of grout between linoleum squares from spilt iodine or hair dye. There’s a tangled wad of hair near the corner of the tub where the caulking is riddled with spots of mold. Up near the lunar surface of the ceiling, there’s a vertiginous moment where the self-leveling camera wheels around violently, followed by a millisecond flash of Malchicken’s face, off balance.
A crack running along the bottom of a picture frame merges into the etched image of a perfume bottle and its pebbled aromatizer. Below is the scribble of the artist’s signature, and then a high-contrast shot of the angle between the back of the frame and the nail holding it to the wall. From there, the camera moves to the toilet paper cozy and peers through the veil of its lace waistband to the bathroom window and the stippled Tesuque sky framed inside. An image of the sink draining (stopper missing) precedes a stunningly abstract view of the raw, threaded end of the faucet and the good twenty seconds or so it takes to form a drop of w
ater and release it. Form and release. Form. Release. Form. Release.
There’s a teasing of dust from the medicine cabinet’s hinges as it opens. A survey of the cabinet shelves ends in the corners where the vinyl shelf-liners bunch up and no longer stick to anything. The mercury in a thermometer reads well below 98. A quick zoom shows a tube of toothpaste called NUMSALVE, its lower half curled like a snail and its cap dinged with tooth marks. The paste, on camera, sparkles. A length of beaded chain leads to a bathtub plug and here, the camera stares up into the rush of oncoming water. The lens collides with pieces of grout before showing the H handle turned on its side. A puffy scrubbing sponge with its rope leash. A string of bubbles floating off screen. Long, tedious shots of skin, hairy and hairless, a forearm. An inventory of freckles near the navel, ten little toes refracted under water. A piece of sock lint escaping. The camera traverses hilly terrain, glides down a soft inner thigh, and exposes the poetry of pubic hairs roiling with the tide. Underwater, the self-leveling head spins, pushes against flesh, and dives bravely. There’s something overhead, like a blimp, casting a long shadow. Fingers, two of them, pointing up, pointing down. There’s several seconds of turbulence, a fractal burst of light, and then total darkness.
Watchers
by Scott Cheshire
from AGNI
I’ve seen the Racetrack Playa for eleven years in Januarys when the desert air and ground are still forgiving. My first year here was spent with the faces one finds in clouds, with the old men, running men, the dancing men one sees in the gnarled and raised roots of arrow weed, in the arms-in-the-air surrender of the Joshua tree, in the ever-changing weathered walls of towering rock and mud. In time, they all move and fall.
My second year here on the playa, I met two others—Raymond and Sport, a gay couple, Australian. They were wandering the Americas on foot and riding the occasional Greyhound. I happened by them in my Honda as they hitched their thumbs from the roadside. We drove some, and then sat facing the sun for two days. We didn’t speak much, our eyes scanning the flat ground beneath us. Some, like Ray and Sport, leave the playa and never come back. Others return for two years, three years. And some just keep on coming.
