by John Gould
I say, “How would we stop thinking?”
And what’s odd is that just for a couple of seconds there, I do. I stop thinking, or at least I think that’s what happens. Something about the question itself, the ruin that hasn’t yet rained down on us, the darkness of Lot’s daughter’s eyes as she wonders what to say to me next. It’s as though God has touched me, or maybe it’s as though God has let me go.
Corkscrew
I don’t go out of my way to watch violent shows on TV, but last night Suze fell asleep with her head in my lap and I couldn’t reach the clicker. Her romance ended — the rich bloke thundered up on his steed, the lady loosened her bonnet — and on came an action movie called Corkscrew.
The hero of Corkscrew was a martial arts guy, a wiry little dude like me. When he first appeared he was running late for a picnic in the park with his girlfriend. The girlfriend was played by one of the actresses from the romance, not the main one but the supporting one, the one who’d played the rich bloke’s snooty, meddlesome sister. This seemed an odd coincidence, but maybe it wasn’t — maybe that’s why the two movies were being run back-to-back in the first place.
It was a fine spring afternoon, light angling in through cherry blossoms, and the martial arts guy looked happy. When he arrived at the park, though, there was something the matter with his girlfriend. She kissed him lovingly, but her breath came in little gasps. Before long her eyes went flat. He tried CPR on her, but no go. There she was stretched out on her sky-blue blanket, wicker basket splayed open to reveal the picnic gear, cutlery and plates and glasses and of course a corkscrew for the bottle of wine still chilling in its bucket of ice. Everything was perfect, except that she wasn’t alive. This not-aliveness was clearly something that needed to be solved, or if not solved at least redressed.
The martial arts guy knew, as we did too if we’d paid attention during the opening sequence, that his girlfriend’s death wasn’t an accident but a murder, at the hands not of common thugs but of members of a drug cartel run by heavily-bearded men with Middle Eastern accents. After a brief, manly weep the martial arts guy took up the corkscrew, not as a memento, as we soon discovered, but as a weapon. Over the next ninety minutes or so — Suze was really crashed out after a long day at the hospital, topped off by the money fight we’d had over dinner, which I was pretty sure hadn’t been about money — he employed it to put holes in a lot of people. I lost track, but a couple of dozen at least. I kept thinking he’d done everything he could possibly do with a corkscrew, punctured every vulnerable part of a person, but he’d always find another. Each death was more horrific than the last, and more gratifying too, as we gradually worked our way up the hierarchy of evil. I’m a nonviolent man, verging on wimpy, but by the end I loathed the main bad guy so much I’d have been happy to uncork him myself.
When Suze woke up, the romance was on again — they were apparently going to alternate the two movies all night long. This disconcerted her a touch, since she seemed to have woken up before she went to sleep, near the beginning of a movie she’d almost finished. Before I could explain, she started in about a dream she’d just had in which she’d been forced to operate on herself, the only instrument available to her being a corkscrew. It wasn’t painful so much as bizarre to feel the steel penetrating deep into her chest. She just kept cranking, and finally drew out her heart with a satisfying pop. She watched it glow a while, then grow dim, dark. The darkness woke her up.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yep.”
How had the corkscrew image made it into her dream? Psychic stuff doesn’t tend to reach me, but in this case I was intrigued. More than intrigued, I was kind of worked up about it, possibly on account of all the excess adrenaline in my system. Adrenaline from Corkscrew, tenderness from the romance.
“I’m done,” said Suze. “Bedtime.” She tried to sit up, but failed.
“Hey,” I said. “When you were snoozing there, did you maybe wake up at some point? And see a guy with a corkscrew?”
“There was a corkscrew in Spoons?”
Spoons was her romance, its title inspired by the lady’s pet image of conjugal bliss. I suppose that may have been the real reason the movies had been programmed as a pair, the utensil motif. “Or maybe you heard somebody say the word corkscrew?”
“Maybe.”
But as I went over it in my mind, I grew more and more convinced that the word had never been spoken. Not by the cops, not even by the coroner, because that was part of the point, that everybody kept being mystified about the weapon.
“Okay, this is it,” said Suze. After a few more tries and a boost from me she made it up out of my lap. “Goodnight.” She kissed me on the neck.
“Goodnight.” I should have said more, but what?
Then it was just me and the TV. I was starting to get the blood back into my legs (I’d been sitting funny, and Suze’s head is not light) by joggling them as though I had a fussy baby in my lap. The baby question, was that what we’d actually been fighting about? Can you fight about something that simply scares and confuses you both? Or maybe it had been about our addictions, work (hers) or smoking (mine). It could have been about any number of things.
There was an hour or so of Spoons still to go, and then Corkscrew would come back on. Could I make it? I was suddenly desperate for proof. Proof that the image of the corkscrew had been transmitted directly to Suze’s mind from mine. Proof that, recent troubles notwithstanding, our connection went that deep. Proof that there was something more to us than could be obliterated by poking us full of holes. As I say, I was worked up.
Spoons was better the second time around. I was more attentive to it, and more receptive, more in need of it after the ordeal of Corkscrew. I’m embarrassed to say how badly I wanted the couple to get together, how anxious I felt about it even though I’d already seen the movie through to the end. I knew they’d be happily united, yet I couldn’t bear to see them apart. Action or romance, murder or marriage, either could grab and hold me, it seemed. Separation or union. Though actually, wasn’t death a union too, since birth was a separation, and death the undoing of it? Why hadn’t some of these deep thoughts come to me while Suze was still up so I could have shared them with her, got us talking again?
I must have been wearied by our fight too, I guess, and by the movie marathon, because at some point I fell asleep. When I woke up I found that I’d stretched myself out and half covered myself with cushions. Corkscrew was just ending for the second time. Everybody who had to die had done so. The martial arts guy released his bloody weapon into the river, which absorbed it with barely a ripple.
I turned off the tube and headed for bed. I could have stepped out for a cigarette first, but I didn’t. I crawled in with Suze, cuddled up. I prepared myself to dream about whatever she had inside her.
Something Apart
Along with his prognosis — six months, maybe twelve — Dan’s doctor offered him a piece of advice. Doctors tended to be young these days, alarmingly so, but this one was older than Dan by a good decade. Retirement age or even past it. He didn’t exhibit the brisk, let’s-do-business demeanor the young ones were affecting, but that of a hobo or addled genius. Karl Marx if Karl had indulged in a few more muffins.
“What matters?” said the doctor. “What have you always meant to do? Swim with the dolphins? Lick Château d’Yquem from your secretary’s cleavage?”
Dan said, “I don’t have a secretary.”
“So, the dolphins. I’m saying, your pancreas? Forget it. Do the thing.”
Do the thing. Decent advice. There were challenges, though. First, Dan couldn’t bring to mind anything, or anything of any worth, he’d always meant to do. If there’d been such a thing he must have done it, or lost the ambition.
And then the problem of planning. The source of all anguish is time — such was the view of Kamilah, Dan’s therapist. Kamilah regularly urged Dan to resist the fascism, as she put it, of past and future, to release himself into the prese
nt. “Time is nothing but tension,” said a little plaque over Kamilah’s chair, and under that, “Saint Augustine.” It was a shiny plaque, in which Dan could study the back of Kamilah’s head, her straight hair reflected wavy. He’d been seeing her for a year now, since a month or so after the Monique debacle, and despite Dan’s scepticism her program showed signs of success. Whenever he felt particularly wrought up he’d begin silently to chant, no past, no future, no past, no future. No past on the in breath, no future on the out, no past, no future. Strolling of an afternoon he’d call to mind his lunch and his dinner, and demand of himself whether he could, at that moment, take a bite from either of them. He could not. Lunch did not exist, nor did dinner. Nothing existed but the benignly unmusical barking of a dog, the burn of the insipient blister on his heel. Reliably, this exercise bled the tension from Dan’s body, opened his senses in a satisfying if slightly unsettling way.
So it was that he’d been living in the present, more or less, for the better part of a year. If he were to buy into his new doctor’s well-meaning advice, this progress would be sacrificed. He’d have to look up dolphins, enquire as to where you could swim with them, make arrangements. He’d be reduced to the level of all the other lame bucket-listers, grasping at their humdrum dreams. Pass.
But then Heart of Darkness. Dan was doing a muck-out of his apartment, with no particular goal in mind — indeed with as little foresight, as little intent as he could muster — when he happened on his old copy. That familiar cover, a bald head shining bright as a light bulb but smeared with some kind of copper emulsion. And with coffee too — Heart of Darkness was pretty much the only Great Book Dan had ever read all the way through, and he’d read it all the way through half a dozen times in the months after he discovered it at school. It had been left behind by a student of literature or colonialism or some such, in the lecture hall in which Dan took his macro economics class. On his first date with his wife, Monique, a couple of years after this discovery, and about twenty-three years before the debacle, she gently boasted of the dream of reading Kafka in the original German. Dan countered with the dream of reading Heart of Darkness in “the unoriginal Spanish.” Monique laughed at this way of twisting the thing around, giving voice to the wonky hunger for the strange. What surprised Dan was how long it took her to realize that this bit of absurd insight was an anomaly for him, no doubt induced by the fever of the moment, the surpassing intensity of his infatuation. In the normal course of things, he just wasn’t that kind of clever.
Spanish. Well, he’d waited tables with a Guatemalan guy one summer, picked up a few phrases. Plus there were apps you could download. It would be a plan, but such a pointless one that it hardly seemed to count. Not so much spending time as willfully squandering it.
Nobody had a copy of El corazón de las tinieblas in stock. Four to six weeks, they said, but the book arrived in three. On the cover of this edition there was a still from the Francis Ford Coppola film (loudly derided by Dan when it first came out, as evidence of his intimacy with the book), Marlon Brando peering through a pall of napalm smoke. There wasn’t going to be time to read the whole thing, especially since Dan’s Spanish comprehension had yet to rise to the level of a toddler. So, the end. Start at the end. Give the finger once again to time, to fate, to cause and effect. Six to twelve months? Fuck you.
Marlow calló, se sentó aparte, indistinto y silencioso, en la postura de un Buda meditando. Well, this was a bit of luck. Two names. Marlow, that was the main guy, the guy who went up the river in search of the dying madman. Why? What was the point of it? Did Dan ever get that sorted out? And the Buddha of course. A young woman at Dan’s work used to wear a T-shirt, Are you for real with this nonattachment shit? And then the rotund little laughing guy, but with his head broken off, a shattered sculpture. That was the Buddha. Dan had told Monique about the T-shirt, and then forgotten he’d told her and told her again. “Nice tits, does she?” Monique had asked him.
The rest of the sentence came pretty easily too. Spanish looked a lot like English, actually. Were all languages essentially the same? Was there was no reason, down deep, for people to misunderstand one another? Marlow something, something apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a Buddha meditating. Meditating Buddha sounded better, for some reason. In the pose of a meditating Buddha.
He’d text it to Monique. Just like that, let her puzzle it out. Would she recall that moment, so many years ago, in the days before either of them was dying? She hadn’t heard tell of his pancreas yet, he was holding that back, ace up his sleeve. He picked up his phone and tapped out, Hola! It didn’t happen, we didn’t say or do what we did or said. If we had it would have been in the past and there isn’t one.
At his session with Kamilah the next day, Dan rehashed some of the old material, then filled her in on his text, and on Monique’s answering silence. “I think I get it now,” he said. “The whole impermanence thing.”
Kamilah checked the clock on the wall behind him. Dan laughed and nodded, but no, his time really was up.
Party Game
The game was who would you sleep with if you could sleep with anybody. The person had to be real but not necessarily alive. You couldn’t say Catwoman, for instance, but you could say Eartha Kitt, and you’d probably get some woo-hoos for it. Also, the person had to be famous — we added that after the time Andy chose Linh, Phil’s wife, kind of joking but kind of not. He’d had maybe four red-headed sluts (peach schnapps, Jägermeister and grenadine over ice), and Phil took a swing at him, threw his shoulder out. No softball, no nothing for weeks.
So yeah, the person had to be famous. I’d always gone with living women, but this one time I couldn’t think of anybody hot enough to be convincing but so-so enough to be safe. Pam had been funny with me ever since the night I said Julia Roberts, and that put me on my guard. Pam hadn’t been bothered about any of my other choices — we’d been playing the game at our parties every couple of months for a couple of years — but Julia Roberts got to her. Maybe the mouth, Pam’s got kind of an odd little mouth and of course Julia’s is giant, but anyhow, we’d get the kids off to bed and start fooling around and Pam would throw in some wisecrack. I’d come back with Jake Gyllenhaal (she’s been soft on him ever since that gay cowboy movie), but my heart was never in it. You invite a person to fantasize, do you really have the right to flip out about their fantasy?
Anyhow, this particular night I couldn’t come up with anybody alive, so I blurted out Mary Mansfield.
“I think you mean Jayne, sweetie,” said Pam. “It’s Jayne Mansfield.” The “sweetie” was promising, and she leaned over the coffee table and popped the olive from her old yeller (prune juice and whiskey) into my mouth.
“The girl can’t help it,” said Phil, this being, as I found out later, the name of a Mansfield movie. “Hot damn.”
The thing is, I didn’t even know who she was, Jayne Mansfield. I’d caught her name when the kids were watching a show counting down the top ten famous car accidents. Lady Di was tops, but Pam knew I’d actually had a thing for her at one point, so no. Everybody thought Jayne Mansfield was a good choice, the men because of her bombshell body, the women because she was smarter than people realized, smart enough to play the dumb blonde to her own advantage. To no one but me was it bizarre that I wanted to sleep with somebody dead.
Jayne came up again later in the evening. Linh said, “Wasn’t she the one who got her head lopped off? Drove her car under a truck and … shhht.” She made as though to decapitate herself with the blade of her hand. Others poo-poo-ed this as an urban legend, and we got telling other urban legends (Mr. Rogers was a Navy SEAL, Lady Gaga has a dink) until babysitters started texting and we all went home.
That night Pam was in a big hurry to get to bed, Julia Roberts forgotten. It’s likely she still had Daniel Day-Lewis on her mind (she’s adored him ever since that gay laundromat movie), but anyhow she was pleasantly eager while I attended to her, and then zonked straight off to sleep. I slipped
out of bed and went to look in on the kids. Then I poured myself another drink, and another. Eventually I nodded off on the couch.
Maybe it was the odd position I was in, my neck cranked around, but anyhow my dream turned weird. Jayne Mansfield was there on the couch with me, my version of Jayne Mansfield, a petite, Pam-like woman but with massive blonde hair. I remember the hair, so she definitely had a head, whereas I didn’t. There was nothing where my head should have been, just a space filled up with the two of us. My being headless didn’t bother us much, in fact quite the opposite. When I awoke I’d actually climaxed in my boxers, my first wet dream in many, many years.
After that it started happening when I was awake. Not the impromptu orgasms, but the sense of having been beheaded. I knew there was a head on my shoulders, I could see it in the mirror, but I was looking at it, not out of it. What would that even mean, to look out of a head? What kind of sick fantasy was that? No, there was nothing where the looking was going on, just all the stuff I was looking at. Once, when Pam and I first met, she got some amazing hash from her ex-boyfriend and we smoked it every couple of hours for a whole weekend. On Sunday afternoon we went down to the water and looked at the waves, and it was kind of like that. Just the waves, nothing else. No head for them to slosh around in.
I described it to Pam that way, after my first couple of episodes, and she remembered. “It was like the waves were licking me,” she said. “Except not like that at all.”
“Right, exactly,” I said, though it seemed a peculiar way to put it.
“And it’s happening again?” she said. “Like, when?”
“Just whenever.” Which was true, I hadn’t been able to discern any order to the incidents. “Once at work, when I was standing at the copier. Another time at home when I was doing the dishes. It was like the sink was where my head should be. Fantastic.”
