“I’ll call my sister. She knows all that smart shit.” Stabby reached for her cellphone and stared at the keypad numbers. “What are these?”
“Uh-oh.”
“Do you even sort of remember how to work a phone?”
“Nope.”
“Shit.”
They parked in an industrial neighbourhood, and they noticed that other cars were pulling off to the side of the road, too. “This doesn’t look too good.”
Stabby said, “Bruiser, I don’t care if we just came down with Alzheimer’s, we are not going to miss the Coffinshark concert.”
“Stabby, you are indeed right. We are going.”
“Can you still drive this thing?”
“You bet.”
And so they made it to Capitol City, but the exits were numbered, not named; Stabby was getting upset. “The warm-up band is probably already playing. Bruiser, let’s take this exit here.” They took the next exit, and Bruiser suggested, “Let’s follow the cars. Wherever the most cars are going is where the concert will probably be.”
It was a good idea and soon they saw the arena, but the scene outside it was a zoo. Concert-goers parked their cars wherever they saw a spot. As everybody had forgotten numbers, nobody was worried—what is the definition of health but sharing the same disease as all of one’s neighbours? Still, Bruiser tried his best to park the car with some sense of order.
Coffinshark was just coming on stage as Bruiser and Stabby selected some seats—festival style, of course.
The lead singer, Apu, sang, “Hello, Capitol City, are you ready to rock?”
“ROAR!!!”
“I said, are you ready to rock?”
“ROOOOOOOOAR!!!! ”
And the band began to rock and everyone held up phone cameras and digital cameras. The first song was the teen anthem “Core Dump,” and the audience went apeshit. The next song was the FM classic “Ear Soup,” and the crowd went even more apeshit. And then the lead singer took the mike: “Capitol City, it’s time to play our biggest hit, ‘UNICEF Is a Whore,’” and the crowd went about as apeshit as is possible for a crowd to go, but when it came to the song’s critical chanting point, the lead singer sang, “Sikkz . . . zskks—arghnt?” and the music stopped.
The singer’s face visibly fizzled and the crowd buzzed. Everybody knew they knew the song, but nobody remembered the chorus.
Following an awkward silence, the lead singer said, “Fuck it. I’m just going to make chimp noises!” The crowd went nuts and the song proceeded with the lead singer singing, “Whoo-whoo-whoo” whenever he hit the chorus. And everyone blissed out and screamed.
What happened next was extraordinary. After taking hefty bows, the band went on to play their next biggest hit, “A-L-C-O-H-O-L,” except when they tried to spell out the title à la Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” they’d forgotten how to spell, too. In fact, they’d forgotten letters altogether—only words remained. Fans stood there staring at each other, trying to absorb this recent deletion.
Coffinshark cranked the volume. “Okay, we may not be able to read and write any more, but we can still speak and we can still sing. So come on, fans, let’s rock!”
And so Bruiser and Stabby and the other thousands of fans rocked en masse—but then some guy near the front tripped and knocked over a female rocker who was dancing, so her boyfriend laid into him, but a punch went the wrong way and hit the wrong guy. Suddenly, the concert erupted into a brawl the likes of which had never been seen before—it was the biggest brawl in the history of the world. Illiteracy had spawned total violence and anarchy.
Bruiser and Stabby were fortunately close to the exit, and they were able to slip out and hide inside a utility closet and smoke cigarettes while the mayhem raged on. Once their pack of cigarettes was empty, they poked their faces out of the closet and saw a battlefield on the arena floor: blood and bodies and dismembered limbs. Teeth crunched beneath their boots as they walked.
“Geez,” said Bruiser. “How many dead people are there, you think?”
Stabby said, “I don’t know. Eight or nine hundred?”
Bruiser looked at her, startled, and then they both grinned and shouted, “We can count again! All right!”
“And how do you spell ‘fun,’ Stabby?”
“I spell it C-O-F-F-I-N-S-H-A-R-K, Bruiser.”
“Woohoo! 666!”
“666!”
SAMANTHA
I said to Zack: “So your story was about numbers?”
“Yes. And faith and hope, too. Nothing like lots of faith and hope to make a story a timeless classic. Dollops of faith; countless extra servings of hope.”
“Brother. So, are you number smart or something?”
“Number smart? Actually, I hate the fucking things. But when I look at them, they don’t make noises in my head the way words and letters do. It’s kind of peaceful, actually. In math class I’d just stare at equations and visit my happy place until the bell rang.”
“I hated math.”
We all nodded our heads, while Serge shook his in dismay.
“Anyhow, it’s my turn for a story, and no, it doesn’t have a happy ending. Or maybe it’s a happy ending in disguise.”
Everyone said, “Woooooooooooooo . . .”
“Let’s find out.”
The End of
the Golden Age of Pay Telephones
by Samantha Tolliver
Stella spent her childhood helping her mother scam money off men stupid enough to still be using pay telephones at the end of the twentieth century; men too afraid of technology to get a cell; men who had lost their cell underneath the car’s front seat and were too lazy to poke around and find it. Suckers.
Her mother was Jessica, a chain-smoking lizardwoman who crossed the nation with Stella, zeroing in on upscale hotels. Once there, they’d hang around pay phones close to the hotel’s restaurants and bars, where they dressed in forgettable-looking outfits: no jewellery or weird makeup or distinctive shoes—like Wal-Mart greeters, minus the blue vest and cheerful attitude. The two would then wait until halfway through lunch hour, when the men in the restaurants had had a few drinks—invariably, one of them would come out to use the pay phone. Once he’d dialled, little Stella would walk over to the phone, look slightly stupid and then depress the receiver, ending the call. Usually, the man would say something along the lines of “What the hell are you doing?” or “What the fuck? Kid, get out of here.” At that moment, Jessica would swoop in and confront the man, usually standing there with the receiver still in his hand.
“Why are you screaming at my daughter?”
“I’m not screaming, and what the hell is wrong with your kid? I’m in the middle of a phone call, and she walks up and hangs it up on me.”
“She’s just a kid. Come on, Stella, we’re going.”
At that point the man would harrumph and redial and go back to his conversation. Jessica would wait a few minutes, then walk up to the man, hang up the receiver and say, “My daughter says you hit her.”
“What?”
“You hit my daughter.”
“Lady, are you out of your tree? I don’t hit anybody, let alone kids.”
“I’m going to the cops.”
“What?”
“I’m filing assault charges. Stella, you run and get the security people.”
Stella would run off, and the guy with the phone would be shitting his pants. “Lady, I didn’t hit your kid.”
“Are you calling her a liar?”
“I’m saying I didn’t hit her. What else am I supposed to say?”
“And you’re calling me a liar.”
“Lady, I—”
Stella would then come back and say, “Security will be here in a second.”
Needless to say, the guy on the phone would be watching his life circle the drain, imagining the horrific press and the life-destroying damage this false accusation would cause. This crazy lady could destroy him. And so that’s the point where Jessica
the lizardwoman would say, “You know, you can make this go away right now. Apologize to my kid and compensate her for her trauma.”
“Compensate her? Oh—I get it.”
“I’m glad you get it. Now pay up or Stella’s going to scream that you groped her, too.”
Out would come the wallet.
Stella had watched countless men call her mother the most dreadful things imaginable.
Stella and her mother tried to do only two grifts per city, three max, depending on the haul. They methodically crossed the country in a Winnebago and lived well off their scam, although as Stella aged, it became more difficult for her to pretend she was an innocent toddler merely goofing around with the telephone. Then Jessica made Stella pretend that she was mentally challenged. This was actually more effective than when Stella was young, because: “Sweetie, smacking a retard is going-to-hell territory. Your calculated drooling, darling, it is golden.”
In Stella’s eyes, the one positive skill her mother gave her was teaching her to read, and she did this only because reading was the only sure-fire pastime that would keep Stella quiet. Besides, to get books for free, all you had to do was go into any library, sign them out and take them away forever. As a result, Stella became self-educated and could speak with authority on most subjects. Around the age of eleven, Stella became more “book smart” than her mother.
One day they were in a Kroger, buying bologna sandwich makings, when the cashier looked at the price of a steak the next cashier over was ringing in. “Can you believe that?”
Stella said, “That’s nothing. Steak is three times as expensive in Tokyo.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. The economy there is in what’s called a post-bubble state.”
“A what?”
Stella went on to discuss 1990s Japanese land speculation, without realizing how much this was spooking her mother, who saw Stella leaving her one day to go on to a better life—and then what would Jessica do? As they carried their bologna fixings out to the Winnebago, Jessica was feeling sick and alone.
Then one day the inevitable happened. They were scamming a heavy-set older man with thick white hair at a bank of hotel pay phones at the Hotel Meridien in Salt Lake City. Stella did a remarkable job of faking mental and physical disablement, and Jessica felt a stab of motherly pride when she approached the man and asked for money. But the man acted a bit strange. When he got hit up for dough, he didn’t call Jessica any names. That should have warned her.
When they got back to the Winnebago, there stood three cops and two hotel staff. Shit.
“I’ve been hearing about you scammers for years, and I always thought it was an urban legend. I guess not. Good thing we got it on tape—the Channel Three News team is going to love this little puppy.”
So off they went, Jessica to the clink and Stella to juvenile custody. The local TV news show did a feature on grifting, using Jessica’s scam as the centrepiece. It turns out the hotel had CCTV cameras all over the lobby and had that day’s scam on tape from dual vantage points.
Fortunately for Jessica, a lawyer named Roy, who liked Jessica’s body type, took on her case. He bailed her out and they went to his condominium apartment and had raging-hot sex. Later, over cigarettes and Cuba Libres, they discussed Stella’s incarceration. The rum—along with Jessica’s lizardwoman tendencies—made her re-evaluate her relationship with her daughter. Jessica told Roy that Stella was now smarter than she was, and confided her worries about that dreaded day a few years down the road when she’d be left behind.
Roy said, “Jessica, you need a man. Men are for keeps.”
Jessica fled town with Roy, who turned out not to be a lawyer after all, but another scammer.
When Stella turned sixteen inside the juvenile custody system, she was released. She moved to Los Angeles, where she tried for maybe ten minutes to get a real job, finally realizing that real jobs weren’t for her. So she turned tricks, tried auditioning for roles, tried to have real relationships with men and friendships with women, but every time she tried, at some point—usually early in the process—she had a massive failure to trust the other person and she pulled the plug.
Years went by. Stella’s inability to trust only grew fiercer, and she also lost her curiosity about the world. Before she was thirty, she was officially too crazy to ever bond with another human being—so she turned her mind to becoming a minister in an evangelical congregation. For a year this actually worked. With her learned sociopathy, she was able to manipulate members of her flock into thinking that they were getting from Stella what they felt they needed from life. But after a while, being a minister was too much work for her. People were, if nothing else, a hassle. Her congregation grew disenchanted with her and asked her to leave.
She moved to a small town in northern California and got a job as a dog groomer and walker. It was enough to pay the rent on a small house in a slightly cracky part of town. It was in this house that she realized that what she really wanted in her life were animals. Animals gave love without condition, although they did require food. Also, animals could be bossed about without legal repercussion. If they became troublesome, animals could be abandoned at the feet of dead volcanoes. Animals were all pluses and no minuses.
Her menagerie grew to five dogs and four cats, as well as local birds and squirrels and chipmunks, and for a few years, Stella really thought she had it made in the shade. Then one day she fell asleep on the sofa in the afternoon.
When she woke up, she padded quietly to the kitchen for a glass of water. Through the screen door, she could hear her pets having a conversation in the yard, and they were talking about her: “Man, is that bitch ever clueless.”
“I can’t believe how easily human beings can be fooled. She actually thinks we like her.”
“It’s not like there’s anyone else out there who’s going to take care of us. We’re fucked.”
“It beats starvation. Are you going to be nice to her tonight?”
“No choice in the matter.”
Stella stormed out the door. “Traitors! All of you! I can’t even trust my own goddam animals!”
The animals rolled their eyes. “We’re busted,” said Sammy, her collie-lab mix. “But it’s not like you got it on tape. Who’s gonna believe you?”
“I trusted you!”
“So?”
“I thought you were all noble and kind and good. You only ever pretended to like me so that I’d feed you.”
The animals all looked at each other. Sammy said, “Stella, all you do is pretend that you’re different and better than we are—as if your species is divine or ‘chosen.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, shut up. We’re bored of you. If you were any animal other than a human being, you’d be totally alone. You still think there’s a part of you that’s superior to everyone else. It’s why you don’t trust anybody. It’s why you made your pathetic and cynical stab at religion.”
“I certainly can’t trust any of you.”
“Grow up. If anyone ought to understand the law of the jungle, it’s you, baby.”
Just then the neighbour’s wind chimes tinkled.
“Whoops,” said Sammy. “The magic spell is broken. Nice talking to you, Stella.”
And with that the animals went back to being animals—except things were different between them and Stella. She felt like her pets had suddenly become office co-workers with whom she had insincere conversations and who didn’t really care for her one way or the other.
A week later, Stella decided she’d had enough and began to drink herself into an early grave. She did a remarkably good job, ending up sprawled on the shoulder of the main road, near the speed trap, the town’s largest single revenue generator.
Stella sat there in the grass, singing a song without a tune, and as she did, Jessica and Roy drove into town.
“Roy, look, slow down, there’s a crazy drunk on the roadside over there.”
“Jesus, wha
t a sinking ship. Makes you wonder about life. Hey look—a speed trap. If it weren’t for the crazy lady, we’d have gotten a ticket.”
The two whooped with joy, and Roy said, “Maybe that crazy lady is an important member of society after all! Makes you wonder.”
Jessica said, “Absolutely, Roy. Mother Nature always makes sure that everyone has a role to play in the world. That scary crazy lady is simply living out her destiny.”
JULIEN
I said, “Nique ta mère, now that was one depressing fucking story.”
“Why? What was so depressing about it?”
“Did Stella really need to drink herself to death at the end of it?”
“She most certainly did.”
“And what about the animals talking to her?”
“What about them?”
“Is that a New Zealand thing—communing with nature?”
“Julien, you’re approaching the stories on too literal a level. Relax and enjoy their texture. Sleep on them. Anyway, it’s your turn to tell one. Put up or shut up.”
It was my turn indeed, and I was underprepared. I had to buy time, so I reopened the earlier discussion about the sheer mental labour required to make up a halfway decent story.
“Serge, there’s probably some neuroprotein that regulates this. What’s it called?”
Serge coughed out an unchewed hunk of bagel. It landed on the carpet beside Diana’s stocking feet. He went as white as a sheet of paper.
“Serge?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you okay?”
“Nothing! I’m fine. Just fine. Now please, start your story, Julien.”
“Very well.”
Bartholomew Is Right There at the
Dawn of Language
by Julien Picard
A long time ago a bunch of people were sitting on a log, looking at a fire, and they were wishing they had language so that they could talk to each other. Grunting was becoming a bore, and besides, they had fire now—they deserved language. They’d arrived.
Of course, they didn’t think of it that way—they only had these feelings that went undescribed because there were no words for them. But within this tribe there was this one alpha guy in particular who saw himself as the creative one. He pointed to himself and said, “Vlakk.” He picked up a stick, held it up, stared at it, scrunched his eyes and then pronounced it “glink.” And everyone there repeated “glink” and henceforth sticks became known as glinks and Vlakk was now Vlakk.
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