by David Nutt
Shaker carts Royce to the car, hefts him and belts him and gets the wheelchair loaded, and soon his high beams are roving across the smooth knolls of ruin at the Tully landfill. Fog has moved in, a morbid touch. Shaker rolls up to the stump. Lit solely by headlamp and misted, the exact origin of the materials bound in chicken mesh remains a mystery. But there is texture and inclination, an elemental quality, and that’s all the origin Shaker needs. He fixes Royce in his wheelchair at the far end of the flatness, so if anything pitches over the invalid won’t be collaterally damaged. The man’s useless legs are layered in flannel blankets. Shaker has tied a handkerchief around Royce’s face. Satisfied with the arrangement, Shaker hopscotches into the hazmat, fires up a flashlight and produces a shovel, and resumes his slow toil on the stump, which, seen from Royce’s distance and grayed in mist, is beginning to lean slightly to the left.
11.
Shaker in nocturnal chrysalis: unclothed, sleep mask dangling off an ear, mouth ajar with maximum drool. This is his regular slumberful state. Except he is standing upright. Sometime after midnight, she wakes to the noise and finds him in the kitchen. He’s shifting foot to foot, the linoleum lisping under his bare, sticky feet.
“You sleepwalk?” the woman asks under her kabuki skin cream, her hair in spools.
Shaker, eyes shut, blindly points at the oven door that is open.
“So you’re either preparing an invisible soufflé or you’re trying to gas yourself to death,” she says. “Or maybe you’re about to explode the whole bodega.”
“Mmmmm.”
“It’s not your bodega!”
She tugs a hank of his hair. Lazily, his eyelids flap open. Shaker feels furcated, half in this room, the rest evaporated, lost to the wind, a molecular frenzy.
The woman sighs and shuts the oven door and tromps back to bed.
It’s not a bad feeling, Shaker thinks.
12.
Shaker’s initial lapse into semi-sobriety came several years previous in a midsized arena strung with athletic association banners and patriotic bunting and beer sponsorship logos. He was keeping his head together at the time with a few protean substances stored in a sporty toolbox. The toolbox was clutched under his arm as he stood on the arena floor with his nostrils sticky, his skull bombed. Only six or seven other people were on the arena floor with him. The rest of the vast space was empty. The audience milled around in the emptiness, watching Shaker’s ex-wife writhe around on stage in an oversized cassock, lost in lumps of massive fabric. This was the first and only time Shaker had seen her since the divorce. She was chanting into an air traffic controller’s headset, babbling in tongues, dry humping the stage, her eyes rolled to the whites. The usual shamanic shtick. Her backing musicians, The Meek American Rapture, were mostly scabs and ringers in this incarnation. They bludgeoned their instruments with sharp implements and power tools but not much passion, lolling in and out of narcoleptic spells.
Shaker, his eardrums stuffed with shredded sanitary napkins, gazed up into the blaze of lamps and random halos, the endless heat on his face, seeing spots.
He walked over and tapped the shoulder of the nearest patron, thirtysome feet away, and said, “I see spots.”
The kid had to tweeze out an earplug to hear Shaker. But Shaker was whipping his head around too much, trying to knock the splotches from his vision, and missed the kid’s response. There was a smoke machine on stage, and the smoke was everywhere. When Shaker’s eyesight cleared, the kid was gone.
On the side of the stage, Shaker could see his ex-wife’s husband. The man stood about six foot six, tailored shirt sucked into a crisp pair of khakis, collar buttoned at the jugular, no tie. Both benefactor and manager, he rented the arenas for her, the tour buses, the union crew, bought airtime on radio and TV. He even bankrolled the greasy tabloid notoriety. Shaker, it seemed, was the only person in this artificial ecosystem not receiving some form of brownbag payola, and he felt a little excluded, a little nixed. His ex-wife had become one of those public-domain punchlines that linger in the netherworld of quasi-fame, dazed and hostile, although she had her adherents, a tiny but venerated gaggle of contrarian critics. There were several in every college town, every city. They penned jargony screeds that argued her unlistenable music was a subversive indictment against the capitalist privilege that had landed her on all those rented stages. In this version of events, she was a courageous dissident, a pop-culture saboteur, and not just a poseur art-nut subsidized by her very rich husband.
After the eleventh encore, she was ushered offstage by a cartel of leather-clad teamsters and unpaid interns. The overhead lamps ignited, and the arena was reshaped around a dense smog that hung like a diseased brain above the remaining audience. There were only three of them now, small and squint-eyed. Her set had lasted seven and a half hours. A single custodian came out onto the floor with a dustpan and broom, looked around, shrugged, and disappeared behind the service door.
Shaker, still maneuvering under his glue stupor, felt shriveled by the spectacle. His legs were sore. A metallic flavor filled his mouth. Twin security men with the close-cropped facial hair of silent film villains were stationed in the doorway, sharing something dainty in a roach clip. Shaker gave them the money in his wallet, then gave them the wallet, and they awarded him a handful of mushroom caps, which he gobbled all at once.
“Bon voyage,” a twin said.
“I am a pillar of salt,” Shaker replied. He touched his left pectoral, knuckled it, squeezed. His eyes were misting. “I feel thick.”
Shaker used his shirtsleeve to blot the wetness from his forehead and face. “What are these socks doing on my feet?” he asked.
“You don’t look so good, guy. What other garbage you been taking?”
“All of aisle nine,” Shaker smiled.
He hefted the toolbox of inhalants, weed killers, sink cleansers, fluorescent cosmetics, household toxins. The tubes were crushed flat, the sprays depleted.
Shaker buckled at the knees. The only activity in the entire arena was his body smacking glorious concrete.
“Touch me,” he moaned. “Someone please just touch me.”
He woke in a hospital bed three days later, feeling fine, absolutely fine. He had sweated all the sensation–national or not—out of his broken body, flushed his nervous, nervous system, the chemicals and the need for the chemicals. All of it purged. The doctors told Shaker they’d never seen adult nasal passages so hairless and clean.
His ex-wife never paid him a visit, although one of her roadies arrived with a much-abused tuba jammed full of yellow carnations. She didn’t bother to include a card.
Now here she is in Agog Manor, at least someone eerily derivative of her, and Shaker can’t tell if he is experiencing the same need or something new. Royce is slumbering upstairs, deposited in his sheets with a year’s worth of financial glossies banked around him. The greenhouse is dark. All life in the manor feels tranquillized, embargoed. Shaker hasn’t showered off the garbage smell yet. He’s standing in the doorway, the reek pulsating off him in concentric rings. The woman is stripped to her slip and sitting in front of the cold fireplace, scouring her hair with a tortoiseshell brush. Her legs are bruised and unshaven. Shaker recognizes the purple tattoo of a coiled serpent that crests her inner thigh. She stops brushing but doesn’t turn around. She only holds up the tortoiseshell, as if passing off a track-and-field baton.
“Do the back,” she says.
“Isn’t it long enough you can reach yourself?”
“Don’t be a boob,” the woman replies.
Shaker kneels behind her and accepts the brush, performing a few practice rakes on his own head, and then he begins taking great whacks at hers. He runs through the strawberry blond curls, going with grain and against, until he feels something loosen, a tension unturn. He touches her neck; the skin seems to vibrate. He is aware a low-grade euphoria is blooming throughout his body, and he grudgingly submits to it. Then the woman starts to hum a familiar melody, an old
outtake, a forgotten favorite. Shaker goes rigid. He tries to bung shut his ear canals by sheer force of will, but that only magnifies the lovelorn burn that’s being generated in his loin region. Grudgingly, he submits to this, too. Just as he is getting used to the humming, it trails off. Her hair is soft and tamed. Shaker sucks in a desperate breath as she leans backward, fitting her contours to his, their bodies molded, neither of them making any sound at all.
The only real surprise here, Shaker realizes, is how much the silence hurts his ears.
13.
Shaker regains consciousness in a new decade, mummified in crepe paper and holiday tinsel, confetti flakes in hair. He’s lying in an empty manor room he doesn’t recognize, and its ceiling is bearing down on his headache with an industrial clang. The woman is somewhere on the same floor. Shaker can hear the rustling of her obscenely-sequined party dress, the one she has been wearing for days and has half-picked to pieces and scattered like fairy dust around the upstairs. They are a week after New Year’s. Outside, a steady escalation of high snows and entombing ices. Shaker touches his head. Someone has given him a very short and unflattering haircut.
Since mid-December, he has toured the regular haunts, and no one has tried to assassinate him yet. He has weekly check-ins with the Tullys. No explosions to clean or corral. All the citizenry have gone docile and seem to be keeping their fantastic disasters safely indoors, or else have shipped them somewhere out of state.
The stump. It has grown into a stack. The Ohio winter, however, has not been gentle. Each day, Shaker is outside in borrowed hazmat and parka, re-wrapping the chicken wire, re-bundling the trash, trying to maintain a respectful structure ten feet in height. A garbage spine that will someday breach the tyranny of heaven. He keeps a ladder at the landfill. When the snows lift and the wind lessens, he mounts the rungs and adds a few more pieces—an appliance, a copper orb—as if crowning a Christmas spruce. But Christmas has passed and his energy is flagging. Today, Shaker finds the structure’s topmost amalgam has been sheared off and blown westward forty feet. The monument is eroding grain by grain. His struggle is a constant glacial slog against a winter that is no better.
One morning, the Tullys appear at Agog Manor with a gift box strapped in red ribbon. Both Brothers are sunburned and pruned from a southerly vacation. Shaker rips into the box and unfurls a new hazmat of his very own.
“Guess you want the other one returned,” he says and suits up. His fingers fill the unknuckled hands. Head occupies hood. Perfect fit.
The Tullys gesture towards the truck outside. A drive, they want.
“Where you wanna go?” Shaker asks, already knowing. He takes a moment to luxuriate inside his weatherproof self, inhaling the plastic fabric that makes his nostril hair tingle and stand at attention. That familiar delirium of synthetic smells. He’s immersed in it. Shaker follows the Brothers to their truck, trying not to huff too loudly.
When the truck rolls into the landfill and parks at the clearing, he doesn’t bother to feign surprise. All three men exit the vehicle and traipse toward the structure. Dirty snow dandruffs the ground. The monument leans against its fresh cable moorings. Shaker tries to remain casual, but soon he is stopped in his tracks, squinting hard, an intent look.
“Fuck me,” he says in his sharp rasp. “At this angle, it looks like a big, gray dong.”
Shaker stews in the frigid breeze while one of the Tullys drags a ladder to the stack and pries free a toolbox that is stamped with the town seal. Shaker’s hood is fogged with bad breath, his whole suit overripe.
“Still, you gotta admit,” he says, “I’ve done worse work.”
Tully One returns with his toolbox, and the men resume their initial position, ranked three-across with arms folded and surveying the monument, like physicists in an underground bunker awaiting some luminous detonation. The wind heaves around them, and the monument sways.
The Brothers slowly nod.
*
Shaker gives it struts. He gives it gradations. And every morning after breakfast, he sweeps away the pack of homeless men who have begun to congregate around his project in nomadic camps. Then he works through the afternoon, planing the sides, squaring the stack off, rendering it less penile in appearance.
The homeless men are not many, and they usually come in clusters, sometimes pairs. Shaker can see the caravan of them stretching up the trash dunes, a row of shabby cloaks, tangled moss beards. A dozen silent faces, stony and old. He thinks maybe they are on some type of scavenger mission, so he stands protective of his land of junk, but the tramps never filch a thing. And they seem to be surviving fine without masks or hazmats, which leads Shaker into a reverie about garbage zombies and scrap-hoarding specters, the junk land as graveyard, the graveyard as world.
The daydream inevitably deflates, and Shaker returns to his trash project, which he will soon unveil for public ridicule. Shaker had originally envisioned a series of matched monoliths rising from the apocalyptic ash like a fire-ravaged Stonehenge for future generations—the homeless and the sheltered—to ponder and debate and maybe, too, immortalize on commemorative dinner plates. But it’s the aloofness, the aloneness, that seems truer to the spirit that undergirds Shaker’s creation as it stands strutted and straightened in the January chill. And also seems truer to Shaker’s niggling, unresolved guilt. So he decides this is the one, the only one. His masterpiece. It’s nearly ready. Just a bit of burnishing on the top face and edges.
And then the far fringes of a nor’easter arrive and knock the monument sideways into the dirt, and Shaker must begin the slow build all over again.
*
She tries her hair up, tied in a mass like an animal nest, or else long and drapey, twisted in rolls, upheld in clips. Sometimes wigs: noir black, bark brown, the same strawberry blond as her actual hair. She swaps the patchwork muumuu for a leopard-skin leotard, a snowy-colored cultist’s gown, nudie suit, farmer’s flannel, S&M corset, with cowgirl hat and without. She spins in the mirror and catches Shaker peeking over her shoulder, a slinky confusion in his look.
“People love to bicker over authenticity,” she says. “But, by my lights, the only authentic act is fakeness. The transparently plastic. That’s the only honesty left.”
“Is that? Is that…?” Shaker creeping closer.
“Shark’s jaw.”
“Thought so.”
“Custom made. The whole necklace. A perfect replica.”
“Smells fishy.”
“Ha.”
“I can’t smell much anymore,” he shrugs.
“All her phases, all her shadows. I can inhibit each of them at any given time, without scheme or logic, just like her, exactly like her. The trick, I think, is she doesn’t know herself. That’s the key to true originality.”
“Probably gets exhausting,” he says. “That shark jaw looks heavy.”
“You think I must have had a sad childhood.”
Shaker nods.
“Of course I had a sad childhood! You know the story. A young girl sits with a radio. She’s hiding under a dingy blanket, or she’s alone in the backyard, she’s at some abandoned gasworks or church basement or the cemetery behind her school. It’s the same sadness everyone else suffers, but hers is more…cinematic, I guess. Mythic. She turns the radio on. She adjusts her chunky headphones, the geeky glasses that are too big for her geeky face. She waits for that song that’s going to save her lonely, little life. And if not save it, at least fool her into thinking her life shines a bit brighter, has some special luster. And the funny part? This lifesaving song? It’s going to come along and ruin her forever. All her romantic expectations will be so warped, she’ll live in a continual state of heartbreak and disappointment and misanthropic funk for the rest of her days.”
The longer Shaker stares at the woman, the less he’s sure what he sees. The bouffant wig that rises like a grain silo. The miniature anvil earrings, the shark bone on a rope around her neck. All these impounded parts.
“I no l
onger know or care what’s natural,” she says. “We are all surrogates for something or someone. People make holes in the world, and other people fill them.”
“How does it work?” Shaker asks. “These jobs you do?”
“Someone calls me on the phone. I drive over. I dress up, lip synch, prance around, die of embarrassment. Then someone uses a spatula to pry me off the floor, hands me my crumpled clothes, and I go on my merry way with a few dirty dollars in my pocket.”
“I guess it beats jumping out of a cake,” Shaker says.
“The strangest thing is I can’t even remember the first time I heard her. One day, I just woke up and realized she was everywhere. Like she’d always been there, lurking in the corners, speaking my secret thoughts, saying what I didn’t know I felt. It can almost make you paranoid, knowing someone like that is out there.”
She sucks in a sniffle, lowers her face, and sops up the tears with the fringe of her granny shawl.
“When I mouth her words, when I do that crazy epileptic dance she does, when I’m pretending to be all the hers that have ever existed, or will ever exist, it’s not mimicry at all. It’s a channeling, a communion. It’s like a séance with myself.”
A troubled grin flares across her face. “My body becomes a language only the dead can speak.”
*
Hob Brock sits at the shopping mall kiosk in a forward hunch, hands steepled, a new goatee around his mouth. The kiosk is set up between a Finish Line shoe store and a store that sells headstones and vanity grave markers, also named Finish Line. Hob has held this chair all winter, peddling sunglasses to kleptomaniac preteens and minivan moms. The mall’s tile floor looks both glisteningly clean and salaciously soiled. The jingles on the public address system are neutered versions of pop songs that have not been relevant for several presidential administrations. These surrounding sounds and odors make Shaker nostalgic for all the muggy hours he squandered in similar food courts as an adolescent. Maybe it’s a type of homesickness, this clinched thing inside him. A single sheet of glass hangs too distant above.
